Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

154. “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

155. “Money is the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

156. “Yet the real potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our emotions and desires, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

163. “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

164. “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

165. “Secular ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep appreciation of suffering.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

166. “One interesting conclusion is that money does indeed bring happiness. But only up to a point, and beyond that point it has little significance. For.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

167. “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

168. “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

169. “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

170. “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

171. “As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

172. “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

173. “Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

174. “Once algorithms choose and buy things for us, the traditional advertising industry will go bust.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great data flow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything you do and feel. Most people like this very much. For true-believers, to be disconnected from the data flow risks losing the very meaning of life. What’s the point of doing or experiencing anything if nobody knows about it, and if it doesn’t contribute something to the global exchange of information?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

179. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

185. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

193. “The Salviati World Map, 1525.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

195. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

197. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

199. “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

200. “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