Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

209. “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

210. “The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

211. “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

212. “Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective condition and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvement in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

213. “Biology enables, Culture forbids.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

214. “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

215. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

218. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

220. “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

221. “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

222. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “The shifting of authority from humans to algorithms is happening all around us, not as a result of some momentous governmental decision, but due to a flood of mundane personal choices.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

238. “True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

239. “Such vicious circles can go on for centuries and even millennia, perpetuating an imagined hierarchy that sprang from a chance historical occurrence. Unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to money, and poverty to poverty. Education comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

240. “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

241. “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

242. “Capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing, at least in periods of accelerating changes.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

243. “Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

244. “Consequently, people live ever more lonely lives in an ever more connected planet. Many of the social and political disruptions of our time can be traced back to this malaise.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

245. “If we are not careful, we will end up with downgraded humans misusing upgraded computers to wreak havoc on themselves and on the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

246. “Instead of praying for miracles, we need to ask what we can do to help.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

247. “Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fuelled by indifference.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

248. “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

249. “The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

250. “It takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even greater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown.”

— Yuval Noah Harari