Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

254. “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

255. “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

256. “An algorithm is a methodical set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. An algorithm isn’t a particular calculation, but the method followed when making the calculation.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

257. “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

258. “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

259. “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

260. “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

261. “Do we enter the immigration debate with the assumption that all cultures are inherently equal, or do we think that some cultures might well be superior to others?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

263. “Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn’t want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

264. “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

265. “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

266. “Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

267. “Can a nation really suffer? Has a nation eyes, hands, senses, affections and passions? If you prick it, can it bleed? Obviously not. If it is defeated in war, loses a province, or even forfeits its independence, still it cannot experience pain, sadness or any other kind of misery, for it has no body, no mind, and no feelings whatsoever. In truth, it is just a metaphor.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

268. “To satisfy both optimists and pessimists, we may conclude by saying that we are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other. History has still not decided where we will end up, and a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

269. “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

270. “Cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

271. “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

272. “But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this is no longer true: Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. It is now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

273. “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

274. “A new branch of mathematics was developed over the last 200 years to deal with the more complex aspects of reality: statistics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

275. “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

276. “This is the deep reason secular people cherish scientific truth: not in order to satisfy their curiosity, but in order to know how best to reduce the suffering in the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

278. “Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

279. “Many neo-liberal economists and political scientists argue that it is best to leave all the important decisions in the hands of the free market. They thereby give politicians the perfect excuse for inaction and ignorance, which are reinterpreted as profound wisdom. Politicians find it convenient to believe that the reason they don’t understand the world is that they need not understand it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

281. “Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

283. “People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

284. “To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

285. “People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

286. “Today the main economic assets consist of technical and institutional knowledge rather than wheat fields, gold mines, or even oil fields, and you just cannot conquer knowledge through war.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

287. “AI will have to analyze human feelings accurately in order to treat human illnesses, identify human terrorists, recommend human mates, and navigate a street full of human pedestrians. But it could do so without having any feelings of its own. An algorithm does not need to feel joy, anger, or fear in order to recognize the different biochemical patterns of joyful, angry, or frightened apes.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

288. “There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

289. “Holy scriptures may have been relevant in the Middle Ages, but how can they guide us in an era of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, global warming, and cyberwarfare? Yet secular people are a minority. Billions of humans still profess greater faith in the Quran and the Bible than in the theory of evolution; religious movements shape the politics of countries as diverse as India, Turkey, and the United States; and religious animosities fuel conflicts from Nigeria to the Philippines.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

290. “AI might similarly help groom the best detectives, bankers, and soldiers in history.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

291. “If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

292. “1. Science is converging on an all-encompassing dogma, which says that organisms are algorithms, and life is data processing. 2. Intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. 3. Non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms may soon know us better than we know ourselves.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

293. “Scientists hope to dispel wrong views by better science education, and pundits hope to sway public opinion on issues such as Obamacare or global warming by presenting the public with accurate facts and expert reports.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

294. “We need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. 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

295. “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

296. “Throughout this book we have repeatedly asked what makes humans superior to other animals. Dataism has a new and simple answer. In themselves, human experiences are not superior at all to the experiences of wolves or elephants. One bit of data is as good as another. However, a human can write a poem about his experience and post it online, thereby enriching the global data-processing system. That makes his bits count. A wolf cannot do this.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

297. “Science needs more than just research to make progress. It depends on the mutual reinforcement of science, politics and economics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

298. “In the minds of the illiterate peasants, who did not speak Latin, “Hoc est corpus!” got garbled into “Hocus-pocus!” Thus was born the powerful spell that can transform a frog into a prince and a pumpkin into a carriage.6.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

299. “Politics, too, is a second-order chaotic system. Many people criticise Sovietologists for failing to predict the 1989 revolutions and castigate Middle East experts for not anticipating the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011. This is unfair. Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

300. “Today, the society called New Zealand is composed of 4.5 million Sapiens and 50 million sheep.”

— Yuval Noah Harari