Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

154. “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

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

160. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

162. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

166. “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

167. “A single priest often does the work of a hundred soldiers – far more cheaply and effectively.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “The Salviati World Map, 1525.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

175. “Vaunted “human intuition” is in reality “pattern recognition.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

176. “Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. They believe that there is some eternal essence somewhere, and if they can only find it and connect to it, they will be completely satisfied. This eternal essence is sometimes called God, sometimes the nation, sometimes the soul, sometimes the authentic self, and sometimes true love – and the more people are attached to it, the more disappointed and miserable they become due to the failure to find it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

177. “Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

178. “If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

179. “Unlike the everlasting soul, the mind has many parts, it constantly changes, and there is no reason to think it is eternal.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

180. “Ever since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

181. “Terrorism is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to dominate global politics?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

182. “A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

183. “Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreement.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

184. “Then what will happen tomorrow? Nobody knows.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

185. “The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe. This is my cosmic vocation. I have no fixed destiny or dharma. If I find myself in Simba’s or Arjuna’s shoes, I can choose to fight for the crown of a kingdom, but I don’t have to. I can just as well join a wandering circus, go to Broadway to sing in a musical, or move to Silicon Valley and launch a start-up. I am free to create my own dharma.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

186. “At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It’s a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colorful beads and cheap trinkets.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

187. “Humans vote with their feet.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

188. “Just as when two clashing musical notes played together force a piece of music forward, so discord in our thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, re-evaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

189. “Una de las pocas leyes rigurosas de la historia es que los lujos tienden a convertirse en necesidades y a generar nuevas obligaciones.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

190. “However, just as the gap between religion and science is narrower than we commonly think, so the gap between religion and spirituality is much wider. Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

191. “As everyone from ancient times till today knows, clerks and accountants think in a non-human fashion. They think like filing cabinets. This is not their fault. If they don’t think that way their drawers will all get mixed up and they won’t be able to provide the services their government, company or organisation requires.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

192. “We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science – but we are still stuck with only national politics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

193. “For centuries humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will is therefore the highest authority of all.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

194. “A person who does not crave cannot suffer.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

195. “So if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is. The answer isn’t a story.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

196. “People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

197. “We do not 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.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

198. “Each of these three problems – nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption – is enough to threaten the future of human civilization. But taken together, they add up to an unprecedented existential crisis, especially because they are likely to reinforce and compound one another.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

199. “Hence it would be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs. Redundant drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

200. “Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful. Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous, and creative – just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace, and the Harry Potter books.”

— Yuval Noah Harari