“Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics” — 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
“Finally, some scientists concede that consciousness is real and may actually have great moral and political value, but that it fulfils no… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“science says that nobody is ever made happy by getting a promotion, winning the lottery or even finding true love. People are… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“It is the life sciences that concluded that organisms are algorithms. If this is not the case – if organisms function in… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing. 2. Intelligence is… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“However, the Scientific Revolution freed humankind from this conviction. The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Biologists invent the contraceptive pill – and the Pope doesn’t know what to do about it. Computer scientists develop the Internet –… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Who knows if science will always be able to simultaneously save the economy from freezing and the ecology from boiling. And since… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“In the nineteenth century, scientists described brains and minds as if they were steam engines. Why steam engines? Because that was the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere,… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“But the single most remarkable and defining moment of the past 500 years came at 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945. At that… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“According to current scientific dogma, everything I experience is the result of electrical activity in my brain, and it should therefore be… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Such racist theories, prominent and respectable for many decades, have become anathema among scientists and politicians alike. People continue to conduct a… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“In the nineteenth century, scientists described brains and minds as if they were steam engines. Why steam engines? Because that was the… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“This unique species, known by scientists as Homo floresiensis, reached a maximum height of only one metre and weighed no more than… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.” — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of… — 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
“Science advances one funeral at a time. Only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“Yet in practice, science and religion are like a husband and wife who after 500 years of marriage counselling still don’t know… — Yuval Noah Harari Copy Share Image
“The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can… — 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
