“Any large-scale human cooperation - whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe - is rooted… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The average person lived many months without seeing or hearing a human from outside of her own band, and she encountered throughout… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Humans are relinquishing authority to the free market, to crowd wisdom and to external algorithms partly because we cannot deal with the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in imagined orders. These are sets of rules that, despite existing only… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
Fundamentally, mankind was unimportant in the ecological system. Then, in one fell swoop, an evolutionary blink of an eye, the human race… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Dataism adopts a strictly functional approach to humanity, appraising the value of human experiences according to their function in data-processing mechanisms.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into ‘superiors’ and ‘commoners’ is a figment of the imagination.… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The humanities and social sciences devote most of their energies to explaining exactly how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The most important impact of script on human history is precisely this: it has gradually changed the way humans think and view… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Thus humans who lived a million years ago, despite their big brains and sharp stone tools, dwelt in constant fear of predators,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“An objective phenomenon exists independently of human consciousness and human beliefs. Radioactivity, for example, is not a myth. Radioactive emissions occurred long… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
The truly unique trait of 'Sapiens' is our ability to create and believe fiction. All other animals use their communication system to… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“But humans do such things all the time. Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“From an evolutionary perspective, the closest thing we have to a human essence is our DNA, and the DNA molecule is the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“threats and promises often succeed in creating stable human hierarchies and mass-cooperation networks, as long as people believe that they reflect the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“So in the struggle against natural calamities such as AIDS and Ebola, the scales are tipping in humanity’s favour. But what about… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Theist religions focus on the worship of gods. Humanist religions worship humanity, or more correctly, Homo sapiens. Humanism is a belief that… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Having secured unprecedented levels of prosperity, health and harmony, and given our past record and our current values, humanity’s next targets are… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“an even deeper level of human consciousness. Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
Humans are extremely good in acquiring new power, but they are not very good in translating this power into greater happiness, which… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The yardsticks that we ourselves have enshrined will condemn us to join the mammoths and Chinese river dolphins in oblivion. Looking back,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“If I look really deep within myself, the seeming unity that I take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Does might make right? Is human life more precious than porcine life simply because the human collective is more powerful than the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“For similar reasons, archaic humans did not initiate any revolutions. As far as we can tell, changes in social patterns, the invention… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Moreover, despite the astonishing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Throughout this book we have repeatedly asked what makes humans superior to other animals. Dataism has a new and simple answer. In… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“other words, while the behaviour patterns of archaic humans remained fixed for tens of thousands of years, Sapiens could transform their social… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Simultaneously, scientists have studied the mental states of people considered to be healthy and normative. However, most relevant researches have been conducted… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Just as there is no barrier between humans and other beings, neither is there a strict hierarchy. Non-human entities do not exist… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“For similar reasons, archaic humans did not initiate any revolutions. As far as we can tell, changes in social patterns, the invention of new… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Whereas chimpanzees spend five hours a day chewing raw food, a single hour suffices for people eating cooked food. The advent of cooking enabled… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Whereas liberalism merged with the milder versions of nationalism to protect the unique experiences of each human community, evolutionary humanists such as Hitler identified… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Small children in affluent societies often dislike showering, and it takes them years of education and parental discipline to adopt this supposedly attractive custom.… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. Organic parasites, such as viruses,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Soviet Communism was a fanatical and missionary religion. A devout Communist could not be a Christian or a Buddhist, and was expected to spread… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
