Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

102. “How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

103. “Humans and machines might merge so completely that humans will not be able to survive at all if they are disconnected from the network. They will be connected starting in the womb, and if later in life you choose to disconnect, insurance agencies might refuse to insure you, employers might refuse to employ you, and healthcare services might refuse to take care of you. In the big battle between health and privacy, health is likely to win hands down.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

104. “You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and it is changing our world beyond recognition.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

105. “In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

106. “Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

107. “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

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

112. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

115. “Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

117. “Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less patient, and investors are the least patient of all.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

118. “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

119. “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

120. “Feelings are thus not the opposite of rationality – they embody evolutionary rationality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

121. “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

122. “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

123. “If, however, you want to retain some control of your personal existence and of the future of life, you have to run faster than the algorithms, faster than Amazon and the government, and get to know yourself before they do. To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

130. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

132. “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

133. “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

134. “Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

135. “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

136. “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

137. “With regard to other animals, humans have long since become gods. We don’t like to reflect on this too deeply, because we have not been particularly just or merciful gods.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

140. “The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

141. “Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

142. “Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

143. “Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

144. “Many Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

145. “A common enemy is the best catalyst for forging a common identity, and humankind now has at least three such enemies – nuclear war, climate change, and technological disruption.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

146. “For more than 2 million years, human neural networks kept growing and growing, but apart from some flint knives and pointed sticks, humans had precious little to show for it. What then drove forward the evolution of the massive human brain during those 2 million years? Frankly, we don’t know.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

147. “The third way to change the laws of life is to engineer completely inorganic beings. The most obvious examples are computer programs and computer viruses that can undergo independent evolution.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

148. “Do we enter the immigration debate with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal, or do we think that some cultures might well be superior to others?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

149. “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

150. “Moreover, most faiths turned death into the main source of meaning in life. Try to imagine Islam, Christianity or the ancient Egyptian religion in a world without death. These creeds taught people that they must come to terms with death and pin their hopes on the afterlife, rather than seek to overcome death and live forever here on earth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari