Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

354. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

356. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

361. “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.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

367. “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

368. “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

369. “Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

370. “Big data is watching you.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “AI is nowhere near human-like existence. But 99 per cent of human qualities and abilities are simply redundant for the performance of most modern jobs. For AI to squeeze humans out of the job market it needs only outperform us in the specific abilities a particular profession demands.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

376. “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

377. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

379. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

381. “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

382. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

385. “For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

386. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

389. “When the car replaced the horse-drawn carriage, we didn’t upgrade the horses – we retired them. Perhaps it is time to do the same with Homo sapiens.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

390. “History is not deterministic. It is not a means for making accurate predictions. Our present situation was neither natural nor inevitable, and we have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

391. “Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

392. “Los historiadores estudian el pasado, no con la finalidad de repetirlo, sino con la de liberarnos del mismo.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

393. “El capital se va paulatinamente de los estados dictatoriales que no defienden a los individuos privados y su propiedad. En cambio, afluye a los estados que hacen cumplir la norma de la ley y de la propiedad privada.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

394. “The stories that provide us with meaning and identity are all fictional, but humans need to believe in them. It’s obvious why humans want to believe the story, but how do they actually believe? How do we make the story feel real? Priests and shamans discovered the answer to this question thousands of years ago: rituals. A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real. The essence of ritual is the magical spell “Hocus-pocus, X is Y!”

— Yuval Noah Harari

395. “It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. But why is it important? After all, fiction can be dangerously misleading or distracting.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

396. “Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it, not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger a personal and social cataclysm. In history, the roof is sometimes more important than the foundations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

397. “Hindu Brahmins insisted that they were naturally smarter than everyone else, but this was pure fiction.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

398. “Modern humanity is sick with FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – and though we have more choice than ever before, we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

399. “You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and boredom, and to allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time – you will never find the truth.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

400. “Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours.”

— Yuval Noah Harari