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

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

210. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

222. “By waving a colorful flag and singing an anthem you transform the nation from an abstract story into a tangible reality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

223. “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

224. “This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution. When we study the narrative of plants such as wheat and maize, maybe the purely evolutionary perspective makes sense. Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

225. “When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new ‘niches for imbeciles’ were opened up.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

226. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

228. “Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

229. “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

230. “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

231. “The algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions and thoughts.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

232. “Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

233. “Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

234. “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

235. “Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

236. “Since humans are individuals, it is difficult to connect them to one another and to make sure that they are all up to date. In contrast, computers aren’t individuals, and it is easy to integrate them into a single flexible network.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

237. “Sapiens rule the world because we alone can cooperate flexibly in large numbers, then.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

238. “Would it be okay, for example, for an artificial intelligence to exploit humans and even kill them to further its own needs and desires? If it should never be allowed to do that, despite its superior intelligence and power, why is it ethical for humans to exploit and kill pigs?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

239. “In truth, so far modern medicine hasn’t extended our natural life span by a single year. Its great achievement has been to save us from premature death, and allow us to enjoy the full measure of our years.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

240. “If this generation lacks a comprehensive view of the cosmos, the future of life will be decided at random.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

241. “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

242. “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

243. “Yet since these triumphs actually result from mass cooperation, it is far less clear why they should make us revere individual humans.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

244. “Morality doesn’t mean “following divine commands.” It means “reducing suffering.” Therefore in order to act morally, you don’t need to believe in any myth or story.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

245. “Money is based on two universal principles: a. Universal convertibility: with money as an alchemist, you can turn land into loyalty, justice into health, and violence into knowledge. b. Universal trust: with money as a go-between, any two people can cooperate on any project.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

246. “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

247. “If somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it sounds like science fiction, it is probably false. But then if somebody describes to you the world of the mid twenty-first century and it doesn’t sound like science fiction – it is certainly false. We cannot be sure of the specifics, but change itself is the only certainty.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

248. “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

249. “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

250. “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