Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Science needs more than just research to make progress. It depends on the mutual reinforcement of science, politics and economics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

305. “By contrast, AlphaZero had not been taught any chess strategies by its human creators – not even standard openings. Rather, it used the latest machine-learning principles to teach itself chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of 100 games that the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish 8, AlphaZero won 28 and tied 72 – it didn’t lose once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

306. “The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

307. “Since humans are individuals, it is difficult to connect them to one another and to make sure that they are all up to date.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

308. “Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

309. “A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

310. “If you believe in an absolute truth revealed by a transcendent power, you cannot allow yourself to admit any error, for that would nullify your whole story. But if you believe in a quest for truth by fallible humans, admitting blunders is part of the game.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

311. “If pupils suffer from attention disorders, stress and low grades, perhaps we ought to blame outdated teaching methods, overcrowded classrooms and an unnaturally fast tempo of life.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

312. “Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs or national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements among people who already agree on the basics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

313. “For thousands of years priests, rabbis and muftis explained that humans cannot overcome famine, plague and war by their own efforts. Then along came the bankers, investors and industrialists, and within 200 years managed to do exactly that.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

314. “From a historical perspective, the spiritual journey is always tragic, for it is a lonely path fit for individuals rather than for entire societies. Human cooperation requires firm answers rather than just questions, and those who foam against stultified religious structures end up forging new structures in their place.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

315. “Hence paradoxically, as we accumulate more data and increase our computing power, events become wilder and more unexpected.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

316. “When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it give you a choice: ‘Either the story is true, or I am a gullible fool.’ When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: ‘Either the story is true, or I am a cruel villain.’ And just as we don’t want to admit we are fools, we also don’t want to admit we are villains, so we prefer to believe that the story is true.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

317. “The ability to navigate is like a muscle – use it or lose it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

318. “Most humans never enjoyed greater peace or prosperity than they did under the aegis of the liberal order of the early twenty-first century. For the first time in history, infectious diseases kill fewer people than old age, famine kills fewer people than obesity, and violence kills fewer people than accidents.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

319. “In the future, however, we may see real gaps in physical and cognitive abilities opening between an upgraded upper class and the rest of society.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

320. “Yet once biologists concluded that organisms are algorithms, they dismantled the wall between the organic and the inorganic, turned the computer revolution from a purely mechanical affair into a biological cataclysm, and shifted authority from individual humans to networked algorithms.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

321. “We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

322. “Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

323. “After IBM’s chess program Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, humans did not stop playing chess. Rather, thanks to AI trainers, human chess masters became better than ever, and at least for a while human-AI teams known as “centaurs” outperformed both humans and computers in chess.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

324. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

325. “As much as we should fear the power of big corporations, history suggests that we are not necessarily better off in the hands of overly mighty governments.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

326. “You cannot experience something if you don’t have the necessary sensitivity, and you cannot develop your sensitivity except by undergoing a long string of experiences.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

327. “The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

328. “Biologists invent the contraceptive pill – and the Pope doesn’t know what to do about it. Computer scientists develop the Internet – and rabbis argue whether orthodox Jews should be allowed to surf it. Feminist thinkers call upon women to take possession of their bodies – and learned muftis debate how to confront such incendiary ideas.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

329. “Modern Germans were created from the merger of Saxons, Prussians, Swabians, and Bavarians, who not so long ago wasted little love on one another.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

330. “Turing knew from personal experience that it didn’t matter who you really were – it mattered only what others thought about you. According to Turing, in the future computers would be just like gay men in the 1950s. It won’t matter whether computers will actually be conscious or not. It will matter only what people think about it. The.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

331. “Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

332. “Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

333. “The single most remarkable and defining moment of the past 500 years came at 05:29:45 on 16 July 1945. At that precise second, American scientists detonated the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico. From that point onward, humankind had the capability not only to change the course of history, but to end it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

334. “We are now creating tame humans that produce enormous amounts of data and function as very efficient chips in a huge data-processing mechanism, but these data-cows hardly maximize the human potential.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

335. “People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors. If you tell a poor American in a Detroit slum that he has access to much better healthcare than his great-grandparents did a century ago, it is unlikely to cheer him up. Indeed, such talk will sound terribly smug and condescending. ‘Why should I compare myself to nineteenth-century factory workers or peasants?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

336. “We have now run out of time. The decisions we will make in the next few decades will shape the future of life itself, and we can make these decisions based only on our present worldview.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

337. “Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

338. “Facebook AI can not only identify ‘meaningful communities’, but also ‘strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together’.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

339. “The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

340. “All social mammals, such as wolves, dolphins, and monkeys, have ethical codes, adapted by evolution to promote group cooperation.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

341. “In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we have only this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

342. “Did you ever vote about the internet?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

343. “Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

344. “By 2050 a ‘useless’ class might emerge not merely because of an absolute lack of jobs or lack of relevant education, but also because of insufficient mental stamina.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

345. “Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

346. “The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

347. “Ironically, the better we map this process, the harder it becomes to explain conscious feelings. The better we understand the brain, the more redundant the mind seems. If the entire system works by electric signals passing from here to there, why the hell do we also need to feel fear?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

348. “The real problem with robots is not their own artificial intelligence, but rather the natural stupidity and cruelty of their human masters.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

349. “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

350. “Human power depends on mass cooperation, and mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities – and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities. In.”

— Yuval Noah Harari