Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

360. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

368. “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

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

374. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “Have we officially entered the post-truth era?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

382. “The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

383. “But just as Big Data algorithms might extinguish liberty, they might simultaneously create the most unequal societies that ever existed. All wealth and power might be concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, while most people will suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse – irrelevance.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

389. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

398. “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

399. “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

400. “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