Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

157. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “Humans vote with their feet.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

163. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits to their human hosts.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

175. “In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

177. “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

178. “Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

179. “But the most important finding of all is that happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

180. “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

181. “Patriarchy has been the norm in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. It has tenaciously weathered political upheavals, social revolutions and economic transformations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

182. “Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

183. “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

184. “Biology enables, Culture forbids.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

185. “Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. And it is doubly important to remember our origins at a time when we seek to turn ourselves into gods.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

186. “In order to enter the art market and displace many human composers and performers, algorithms won’t have to begin by straightaway surpassing Tchaikovsky. It will be enough if they outperform Britney Spears.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

187. “If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the center, because the center is built on existing knowledge.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

188. “Why is English so widespread today, and not Danish?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

189. “Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

190. “In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

191. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

193. “In fact, in the first recorded encounter between Sapiens and Neanderthals, the Neanderthals won.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

194. “Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, bit it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

195. “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

196. “As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it – and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

197. “Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

198. “Nothing is inherently beautiful, sacred, or sexy; human feelings make it so.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

199. “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

200. “Technology has changed everything by creating a set of global existential threats that no nation can solve on its own.”

— Yuval Noah Harari