Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

2. “Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

3. “Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

4. “There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

5. “Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

6. “This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

7. “In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

8. “You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

9. “The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

10. “People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

11. “This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

12. “We should never underestimate human stupidity. Both on the personal and on the collective level, humans are prone to engage in self-destructive activities.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

13. “There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

14. “Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

15. “Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.1.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

16. “The wandering bands of storytelling Sapiens were the most important and most destructive force the animal kingdom had ever produced.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

17. “The more we know, the less we can predict.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

18. “To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

19. “The Useless Class The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

20. “Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

21. “People rarely appreciate their ignorance, because they lock themselves inside an echo chamber of like-minded friends and self-confirming news feeds, where their beliefs are constantly reinforced and seldom challenged.3.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

22. “Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

23. “The real test of ‘knowledge’ is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

24. “The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

25. “A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

26. “The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

27. “Artificial intelligence is now poised to surpass human intelligence.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

28. “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

29. “History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

30. “Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

31. “Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

32. “To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

33. “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

34. “To survive and flourish in such a world, you will need a lot of mental flexibility and great reserves of emotional balance. You will have to repeatedly let go of some of what you know best, and feel at home with the unknown.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

35. “Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life. Especially as technology gets better at understanding humans, you might increasingly find yourself serving it, instead of it serving you.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

36. “Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

37. “Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

38. “One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world and think in absolute terms:.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

39. “But the best thing fire did was cook. Foods that humans cannot digest in their natural forms – such as wheat, rice and potatoes – became staples of our diet thanks to cooking. Fire not only changed food’s chemistry, it changed its biology as well. Cooking killed germs and parasites that infested food. Humans also had a far easier time chewing and digesting old favourites such as fruits, nuts, insects and carrion if they were cooked.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

40. “It takes a tribe to raise a human.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

41. “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful or plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

42. “Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

43. “One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

44. “So the best advice I could give a fifteen-year-old stuck in an outdated school somewhere in Mexico, India or Alabama is: don’t rely on the adults too much. Most of them mean well, but they just don’t understand the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

45. “Nothing captures the biological argument better than the famous New Age slogan: ‘Happiness begins within.’ Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

46. “God is dead – it’s just taking a while to get rid of the body.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

47. “No clear line separates healing from upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

48. “Have you seen those zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

49. “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

50. “In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well-heeled go into debt buying cars and.”

— Yuval Noah Harari