Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos. From.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

52. “This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

53. “We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

54. “The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class,” leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

55. “As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of some divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. As far as we can tell at this point, human subjectivity would not be missed. Hence any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

56. “It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted ‘human intuition’ is in reality ‘pattern recognition’.3.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

57. “Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

58. “Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

59. “Unfortunately, history does not give discounts.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

60. “Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

61. “The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

62. “Humans are used to thinking about life as a drama of decision-making.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

63. “Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

64. “Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

65. “Morality doesn’t mean ‘following divine commands’. It means ‘reducing suffering’. Hence in order to act morally, you don’t need to believe in any myth or story. You just need to develop a deep appreciation of suffering.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

66. “History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others. Human.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

67. “How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

68. “Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

69. “In the long run, algorithms may learn how to compose entire tunes, playing on human emotions as if they were a piano keyboard. Using your biometric data, the algorithms could even produce personalized melodies, which you alone in the entire universe would appreciate.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

70. “We aren’t born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life, we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately and others show compassion to us. if we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

71. “Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

72. “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.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

73. “We should never underestimate human stupidity, it’s one of the most powerful forces in history.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

74. “Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning; modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

75. “The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

76. “Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

77. “Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their services?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

78. “Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

79. “Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who founded the Cynical school, lived in a barrel. When Alexander the Great once visited Diogenes as he was relaxing in the sun, and asked if there were anything he might do for him, the Cynic answered the all-powerful conqueror, ‘Yes, there is something you can do for me. Please move a little to the side. You are blocking the sunlight.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

80. “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

81. “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

82. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

83. “The sum total of money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet the sum total of coins and banknotes is less than $6 trillion.7 More than 90 per cent of all money – more than $50 trillion appearing in our accounts – exists only on computer servers.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

84. “Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

85. “Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

86. “If we want to prevent the concentration of all wealth and power in the hands of a small elite, the key is to regulate the ownership of data.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

87. “Poverty, sickness, wars, famines old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

88. “When a thousand people believe some made-up story for a month – that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years – that’s religion, and we are admonished to call it fake news in oder not to for the feelings of the faithful.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

89. “The merger of infotech and biotech might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and undermine both liberty and equality. Big Data algorithms might create digital dictatorships in which all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse – irrelevance.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

90. “Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

91. “In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

92. “An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. An algorithm isn’t a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

93. “The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real questions facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?‘, but “What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

94. “They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

95. “On the psychological level, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Dramatic improvements in conditions, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

96. “A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

97. “Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” – critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

98. “Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

99. “Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

100. “The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups.”

— Yuval Noah Harari