Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

452. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

455. “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

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “The only sure way to stop global warming is to stop economic growth, which no government is willing to do.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

470. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

472. “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

473. “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

474. “So here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

475. “To love means to be liberated from the obsession with whatever thoughts, emotions, and desires pop into my own mind right now, and instead to listen to others and see what is happening with them. It starts with simple things, such as listening to somebody else.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

482. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

484. “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

485. “In 1776 the Scottish economist Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, probably the most important economics manifesto of all time. In.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

486. “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

487. “And what is ‘sensitivity’? It means two things. Firstly, paying attention to my sensations, emotions and thoughts. Secondly, allowing these sensations, emotions and thoughts to influence me.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

488. “Much of ancient mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

489. “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

490. “Notwithstanding the danger of mass unemployment, what we should worry about even more is the shift in authority from humans to algorithms, which might destroy any remaining faith in the liberal story and open the way to the rise of digital dictatorships.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

491. “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

492. “Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society’s imagined hierachy. Harry Potter is a good example. Removed from his disinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant muggles, he arrives at Hogwarts without any experience in magic. It takes him seven books to gain a firm command of his powers and knowledge of his unique abilities.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

493. “Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

494. “The problem starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultranationalism.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

495. “The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of ‘improvements’, each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

496. “The scientist who says her life is meaningful because she increases the store of human knowledge, the soldier who declares that his life is meaningful because he fights to defend his homeland, and the entrepreneur who finds meaning in building a new company are no less delusional than their medieval counterparts who found meaning in reading scriptures, going on a crusade or building a new cathedral.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

497. “If AI and 3-D printers indeed take over from the Bangladeshis and Bangalorians, the revenues that previously flowed to South Asia will now fill the coffers of a few tech giants in California. Instead of economic growth improving conditions all over the world, we might see immense new wealth created in high-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while many developing countries collapse.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

498. “Just as there is no barrier between humans and other beings, neither is there a strict hierarchy. Non-human entities do not exist merely to provide for the needs of man. Nor are they all-powerful gods who run the world as they wish. The world does not revolve around humans or around any other particular group of beings.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

499. “Does happiness really depend on self-delusion?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

500. “Starving children have no liberties.”

— Yuval Noah Harari