Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

203. “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

204. “Humans vote with their feet.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

205. “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

206. “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

207. “Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

208. “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

209. “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

210. “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

211. “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

212. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

227. “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

228. “Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

230. “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

231. “Nobody is ever made happy by winning the lottery, buying a house, getting a promotion or even finding true love. Peopleare made happy by one thing and one thing only – pleasant sensations in their bodies.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

232. “Biology enables, Culture forbids.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

233. “Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

236. “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

237. “Famine, plague and war will probably continue to claim millions of victims in the coming decades. Yet they are no longer unavoidable tragedies beyond the understanding and control of a helpless humanity.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

239. “Mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

240. “However, over the last few decades the life sciences have reached the conclusion that this liberal story is pure mythology. The single authentic self is as real as the eternal soul, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If I look really deep within myself, the seeming unity that I take for granted dissolves into a cacophony of conflicting voices, none of which is ‘my true self’. Humans aren’t individuals. They are ‘dividuals’.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

241. “Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

242. “We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

243. “The global empire being forged before our eyes is not governed by any particular state or ethnic group. Much like the Late Roman Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite, and is held together by a common culture and common interests.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

244. “Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

245. “The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

246. “Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers. Intelligence and toolmaking were obviously very important as well. But if humans had not learned to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, our crafty brains and deft hands would still be splitting flint stones rather than uranium atoms.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

247. “Consequently, despite the appearance of many new human jobs, we might nevertheless witness the rise of a new useless class. We might actually get the worst of both worlds, suffering simultaneously from high unemployment and a shortage of skilled labor. Many people might share the fate not of nineteenth-century wagon drivers, who switched to driving taxis, but of nineteenth-century horses, who were increasingly pushed out of the job market altogether.15.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

248. “When Epicurus defined happiness as the supreme good, he warned his disciples that it is hard work to be happy. Material achievements alone will not satisfy us for long. Indeed, the blind pursuit of money, fame and pleasure will only make us miserable. Epicurus recommended, for example, to eat and drink in moderation, and to curb one’s sexual appetites. In the long run, a deep friendship will make us more content than a frenzied orgy. Epicurus.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

250. “Which means that when designing their self-driving car, Toyota or Tesla will be transforming a theoretical problem in the philosophy of ethics into a practical problem of engineering.”

— Yuval Noah Harari