Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “This ‘useless class’ will not be merely unemployed – it will be unemployable.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

304. “Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

305. “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

306. “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

307. “Como todo el mundo sabe, desde tiempos antiguos hasta hoy, los amanuenses y contables piensan de una manera no humana.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

308. “As the joke goes, ‘How many Vietnam vets does it take to change a light bulb?’ ‘You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there.’6.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

309. “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

310. “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

311. “That’s why the theory of evolution cannot accept the idea of souls, at least if by ‘soul’ we mean something indivisible, immutable and potentially eternal. Such an entity cannot possibly result from a step-by-step evolution. Natural.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

312. “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

314. “Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

315. “Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

316. “We like to see underdogs win. But there is no justice in history. Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion. Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

317. “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

318. “The only sure way to stop global warming is to stop economic growth, which no government is willing to do.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

319. “So here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

320. “Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They may take the form, for example, of a suburban cottage with a swimming pool and an evergreen lawn, or a gleaming penthouse with an enviable view. Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

321. “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

322. “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

323. “The humanities and social sciences devote most of their energies to explaining exactly how the imagined order is woven into the tapestry of life.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

324. “So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narratives of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful, and find happiness in that conviction.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

326. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

329. “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

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

334. “Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big, incomprehensible words.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

335. “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

336. “When considering automation, therefore, it is wrong to compare the abilities of a single human driver to that of a single self-driving car, or of a single human doctor to that of a single AI doctor. Rather, we should compare the abilities of a collection of human individuals to the abilities of an integrated network.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari