“People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors. If you tell a poor American in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Peasants were worried about the future not just because they had more cause for worry, but also because they could do something… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“economic pie of 2014 is far larger than the pie of 1500, but it is distributed so unevenly that many African peasants… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The stress of farming had far-reaching consequences. It was the foundation of large-scale political and social systems. Sadly, the diligent peasants almost… — 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
