Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

257. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

259. “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

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

266. “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

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

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. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown while maintaining their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the First World War. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. Teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the twenty-first century demands, since they themselves are the product of the old educational system.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

283. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

285. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

287. “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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

293. “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

294. “In the twenty-first century we might witness the creation of a new massive class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to the prosperity, power and glory of society. This ‘useless class’ will not be merely unemployed – it will be unemployable.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

295. “We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us. The word ‘domesticate’ comes from the Latin domus, which means ‘house’. Who’s the one living in a house? Not the wheat. It’s the Sapiens.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

296. “We are living in a global world, and whether we like it or not our lives are intertwined with the lives of people on the other side of the planet. They grow our food, they manufacture our clothes, they might die in a war fought for our oil prices, and they might be the victims of our lax environmental laws. We should not ignore our ethical responsibilities to people just because they live far away.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

297. “For real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war. There has never been real peace in the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

298. “To love means to be liberated from the obsession with whatever thoughts, emotions, and desires pop into my own mind right now, and instead to listen to others and see what is happening with them. It starts with simple things, such as listening to somebody else.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

299. “In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

300. “The big question facing humans isn’t “what is the meaning of life?” but rather “how do we stop suffering?”

— Yuval Noah Harari