Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

403. “The Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita relates how in the midst of a murderous civil war, the great warrior prince Arjuna is consumed with doubt. Seeing his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he hesitates over whether to fight and kill them. He begins to wonder what good and evil are, who decided it, and what the purpose of human life is.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

405. “But then who said life was simple? Deal with it.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

406. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

408. “Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health. People.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

409. “Soon authority might shift again – from humans to algorithms.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

410. “Some believe that if we could only crack the genetic code and map every neuron in the brain, we will know all of humanity’s secrets. After all, if humans have no soul, and if thoughts, emotions and sensations are just biochemical algorithms, why can’t biology account for all the vagaries of human societies?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

411. “More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

419. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

429. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “The feminine genes that made it to the next generation belonged to women who were submissive caretakers. Women who spent to much time fighting for power did not leave any of those powerful genes for future generations.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

442. “Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

443. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

445. “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

446. “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

447. “Morality, art, spirituality, and creativity are universal human abilities embedded in our DNA.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

448. “Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

449. “Over the last seventy years humankind has broken not only the Law of the Jungle, but also the Chekhov Law. Anton Chekhov famously said that a gun appearing in the first act of a play will inevitably be fired in the third. Throughout.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

450. “Until a short time ago facial recognition was a favourite example of something that even babies accomplish easily but which escaped even the most powerful computers. Today facial-recognition programs are able to identify people far more efficiently and quickly than humans can.”

— Yuval Noah Harari