Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

352. “Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

353. “En la realidad objetiva, las cosas existen independientemente de nuestras creencias y sentimientos.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

354. “Credit is the economic manifestation of trust.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

355. “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

356. “Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that one knows exactly where the world is heading: down. Bewilderment is more humble and therefore more clear-sighted.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

357. “Sapiens use language to create completely new realities. During the last 70,000 years the intersubjective realities that Sapiens invented became ever more powerful, so that today they dominate the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

358. “In reply to Roman peace offers, the chieftain Calgacus called the Romans ‘the ruffians of the world’, and said that ‘to plunder, slaughter and robbery they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace’.2.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

359. “Global politics thus follows the Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way, by missing this or that ingredient of the dominant political package.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

360. “Modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

361. “One groundbreaking experiment was conducted by Daniel Kahneman, who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

362. “This network of artificial instincts is called culture’.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

363. “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.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

364. “We just don’t know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore. So considering everything that is happening in our chaotic world, what should we focus on?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

365. “Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

366. “Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was justified by the liberal story, so the coming technological revolution might establish the authority of Big Data algorithms, while undermining the very idea of individual freedom.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

367. “6. The Catholic alpha male abstains from sexual intercourse and childcare, even though there is no genetic or ecological reason for him to do so.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

368. “When I was twenty-one, I finally realized that I was gay, after several years of living in denial. That’s hardly exceptional. Many gay men spend their entire teenage years unsure about their sexuality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

369. “From a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition natural.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

370. “If you are really in love with someone, you never worry about the meaning of life.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

371. “Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

372. “Previous generations thought about peace as the temporary absence of war. Today we think about peace as the implausibility of war.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

373. “So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

374. “The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

375. “More than a century after Nietzsche pronounced Him dead, God seems to be making a comeback. But this is a mirage. God is dead – it’s just taking a while to get rid of the body.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

376. “Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form or humans will come to live in “digital dictatorships.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

377. “Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

378. “Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching “the four Cs” – critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity.3 More broadly, they believe, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasize general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

379. “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

380. “In order to flourish we still need to ground ourselves in intimate communities. For millions of years, humans have been adapted to living in small bands of no more than a few dozen people. Even today most of us find it impossible to really know more than 150 individuals, irrespective of how many Facebook friends we boast.4 And if we don’t belong to any intimate community, we humans feel lonely and alienated.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

381. “Rather, he led them against the Manchu Qing dynasty in the Taiping Rebellion – the deadliest war of the nineteenth century. From 1850 to 1864, at least 20 million people lost their lives; far more than in the Napoleonic Wars or in the American Civil War.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

382. “If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

383. “Most mammals emerge from the womb like glazed earthenware emerging from a kiln – any attempt at remoulding will only scratch or break them. Humans emerge from the womb like molten glass from a furnace. They can be spun, stretched and shaped with a surprising degree of freedom.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

384. “People drink alcohol to forget, they smoke pot to feel peaceful, they take cocaine and methamphetamines to be sharp and confident, whereas Ecstasy provides ecstatic sensations and LSD sends you to meet Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. What some people hope to get by studying, working or raising a family, others try to obtain far more easily through the right dosage of molecules.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

385. “Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

386. “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

387. “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

388. “There is little sense, then, in arguing that the natural function of women is to give birth, or that homosexuality is unnatural. Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define manhood and womanhood reflect human imagination more than biological reality.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

389. “If I believe in God at all, it is my choice to believe. If my inner self tells me to believe in God- then I believe. I believe because I fell God’s presence, and my heart tells me He is there. But if I no longer feel God’s presence, and if my heart suddenly tells me that there is no God-I will cease believing. Either way, the real source of authority is my own feelings. So even while saying that I believe in God, the truth is that I have a much stronger belief in my own inner voice.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

390. “A parrot can say anything Albert Einstein could say, as well as mimicking the sounds of phones ringing, doors slamming and sirens wailing. Whatever advantage Einstein had over a parrot, it wasn’t vocal.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

391. “For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In the early twenty-first century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack. Hence.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

392. “Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers. And.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

393. “It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

394. “In order to cope with the unprecedented technological and economic disruptions of the twenty-first century, we need to develop new social and economic models as soon as possible. These models should be guided by the principle of protecting humans rather than jobs. Many jobs are uninspiring drudgery and are not worth saving. Nobody’s life’s dream is to be a cashier. We should focus instead on providing for people’s basic needs and protecting their social status and self-worth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

395. “Radical Islam poses no serious threat to the liberal package, because for all their fervour the zealots don’t really understand the world of the twenty-first century, and have nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities that new technologies are generating all around us.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

396. “As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

397. “An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

398. “Most people who go on identity quests are like children going treasure hunting. They find only what their parents have hidden for them in advance.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

399. “There is some evidence that the size of the average Sapiens brain has actually decreased since the age of foraging.5 Survival in that era required superb mental abilities from everyone. 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. You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

400. “The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”

— Yuval Noah Harari