Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

452. “Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature.’ But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

453. “Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

454. “People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

455. “Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

456. “One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion and my culture are the most important in the world – hence my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole. How can we make nations, religions and cultures a bit more realistic and modest about their true place in the world?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

457. “Those living in palaces have always had different agendas to those living in shacks, and that is unlikely to change in the twenty-first century.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

458. “Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

459. “So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

460. “Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

461. “How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

462. “Humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

463. “Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

464. “Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve, would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans, and would the Qur’an have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

465. “Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

466. “If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

467. “Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

468. “Teachers allowed themselves to focus on shoving data while encouraging pupils ‘to think for themselves’. Due to their fear of authoritarianism, liberal schools had a particular horror of grand narratives. They assumed that as long as we give students lots of data and a modicum of freedom, the students will create their own picture of the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

469. “The Christian saints did not merely resemble the old polytheistic gods. Often they were these very same gods in disguise. For example, the chief goddess of Celtic Ireland prior to the coming of Christianity was Brigid. When Ireland was Christianised, Brigid too was baptised. She became St Brigit, who to this day is the most revered saint in Catholic Ireland. The.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

470. “Of all human collective activities, the one most difficult to organise is violence.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

471. “Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

472. “We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history’s choices are not made for the benefit of humans. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

473. “Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, ‘us vs them’, and to foresee the potential unity of humankind.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

474. “Terrorism works by pressing the fear button deep in our minds and hijacking the private imagination of millions of individuals.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

475. “This is all the fault of evolution. For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness. The.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

476. “Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

477. “Today, the richest 1 percent own half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly, the richest one hundred people together own more than the poorest four billion.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

478. “A Christian may be a capitalist as easily as a socialist, and even though a few things Jesus said smack of downright communism, during the Cold War good American capitalists went on reading the Sermon on the Mount without taking much notice.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

479. “Eagles, for example, identify thermal columns rising from the ground, spread their giant wings and allow the hot air to lift them upwards. Yet eagles cannot control the location of the columns, and their maximum carrying capacity is strictly proportional to their wingspan.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

480. “When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

481. “Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

482. “Modernity, in contrast, is based on the firm belief that economic growth is not only possible, but absolutely essential... Modernity has turned ‘more stuff’ into a panacea applicable to almost all public and private problems, from religious fundamentalism through Third World authoritarianism down to a failed marriage... Economic growth has thus become the crucial juncture where almost all modern religions, ideologies and movements meet.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

483. “In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf.3.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

484. “Well, suppose you observe a pride of lions take down and devour a giraffe. You wait patiently until they’re done. But it’s still not your turn because first the hyenas and jackals – and you don’t dare interfere with them – scavenge the leftovers. Only then would you and your band dare approach the carcass, look cautiously left and right – and dig into the edible tissue that remained.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

485. “At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

486. “Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia depend on exporting oil and gas. Their economies will collapse if oil and gas suddenly give way to solar and wind.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

487. “While he originally sang about ‘a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode’, under pressure from white-owned radio stations Berry changed the lyrics to ‘a country boy named Johnny B. Goode’. As.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

488. “In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

489. “Donald Trump warned voters that the Mexicans and Chinese would take their jobs, and that they should therefore build a wall on the Mexican border.4 He never warned voters that algorithms would take their jobs, nor did he suggest building a firewall on the border with California.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

490. “Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

491. “What do you do when nobody needs your cheap unskilled laborers and you don’t have the resources to build a good education system and teach them new skills?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

492. “On 23 August 1572, French Catholics who stressed the importance of good deeds attacked communities of French Protestants who highlighted God’s love for humankind. In this attack, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, between 5,000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

493. “We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

494. “We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

495. “A pirate who loots a Spanish treasure fleet and buries a chest full of glittering coins on the beach of some Caribbean island is not a capitalist.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

496. “The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man. It’s.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

497. “So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of “attention merchants.”2 They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

498. “It therefore makes absolutely no sense to credit Judaism and its Christian and Muslim offspring with the creation of human morality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

499. “Russia has been following the schoolyard-bully principle: pick on the weakest kid, and don’t beat him up too much, lest the teacher intervene.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

500. “In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves. Terrorists.”

— Yuval Noah Harari