Historians Quote by Yuval Noah Harari

““Though historians occasionally try their hand at prophecy (without notable success), the study of history aims above all to make us aware of possibilities we don’t normally consider. Historians study the past not in order to repeat it, but in order to be liberated from it.””

Yuval Noah Harari

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 3.0 out of 5 (5 ratings)

More by Yuval Noah Harari

“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

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

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

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

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

Image

“the Chinese air-purification market is booming.”

Yuval Noah Harari

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

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

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

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

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

Image

“Whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something”

Yuval Noah Harari

Image

Explore all 1,200 Yuval Noah Harari quotes

More Historians quotes

“I know quite well why I became a historian.... It was because dissension was frowned upon when I was a child: 'Don't argue, Claudia,'…

Penelope Lively

Image

The quarrel of the sociologists with the historians is that the latter have learned so much about how to do it that they have…

Anonymous

Image

“An ambitious freshman congresswoman demanded funding to put a public historian in every zip code in the country, a correction for what she called…

Danielle Evans

Image

The simplest things to see are the things we are most blind to.

Milliton MUNNEY

Image

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean…

Alice Dreger

Image

“It is not acceptable that election winners interpret history. History should be left to historians who have a difficult task. They should try to…

Eraldo Banovac

Image

Aging nations have arteries clogged with obsolete laws, slowing blood flow and preventing oxygen from reaching all parts of the body politic. Physicians call…

Jim Cooper

Image

“Recent fads in history and biography have increasingly exalted the aridity of chronology and fact, and have, with some valid reason, rejected romanticizing and…

Markham Shaw Pyle