Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

102. “The danger is that if we invest too much in developing AI and too little in developing human consciousness, the very sophisticated artificial intelligence of computers might only serve to empower the natural stupidity of humans.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

103. “If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

104. “By 2050, not only the idea of a job for life but even that of a profession for life might seem antediluvian.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

105. “The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behavior.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

106. “This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

107. “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

108. “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

109. “Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

110. “Unlike nuclear war – which is a future potential – climate change is a present reality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

111. “First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

112. “The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

113. “There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

114. “If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

115. “Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

116. “Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

117. “Once politicians can press our emotional buttons directly, generating anxiety, hatred, joy, and boredom at will, politics will become a mere emotional circus.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

118. “Alamogordo, 16 July 1945, 05:29:53. Eight seconds after the first atomic bomb was detonated. The nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer, upon seeing the explosion, quoted from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

119. “One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

120. “No investigation of our divine future can ignore our own animal past, or our relations with other animals – because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans. You.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

121. “If you suffer because of your belief in God or in the nation, that does not prove that your beliefs are true. Maybe you are just paying the price of your gullibility. However, most people don’t like to admit that they are fools. Consequently, the more they sacrifice for a particular belief, the stronger their faith becomes.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

122. “If you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, explore dead ends, make space for doubts and boredom, and allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

123. “Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

124. “You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

125. “Revolutions are usually made by small networks of agitators rather than by the masses. If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

126. “According to the Buddha, then, life has no meaning, and people don’t need to create any meaning. They just need to realise that there is no meaning, and thus be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

127. “For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

128. “The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

129. “The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

130. “The first step is to tone down the prophecies of doom, and switch from panic mode to bewilderment. Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that I know exactly where the world is heading – down. Bewilderment is more humble, and therefore more clear-sighted. If you feel like running down the street crying ‘The apocalypse is upon us!’, try telling yourself ‘No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

131. “In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city state, they followed this line of thinking even further, and pegged ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, ministers get a raise, as if that is what their job is all about.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

132. “If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness, but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness. If you experience joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

133. “As bureaucracies accumulate power they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality; they can change reality to fit their stories. In the end external reality matches their bureaucratic fantasies, but only because they forced reality to do so.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

134. “We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

135. “The less political violence in a particular state, the greater the public shock at an act of terrorism.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

136. “Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

137. “Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

138. “So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. 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 can imagine.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

139. “If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

140. “It is extremely hard to discover the truth when you are ruling the world. You are just far too busy.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

141. “Ideas change the world only when they change our behaviour.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

142. “In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

143. “It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

144. “Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

145. “In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

146. “Contrary to common wisdom, nationalism is not a natural and eternal part of the human psyche, and it is not rooted in human biology.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

148. “The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying. You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind, but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

149. “Silence isn’t neutrality; it is supporting the status-quo.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

150. “The Salviati World Map, 1525.”

— Yuval Noah Harari