Top 500 Yuval Noah Harari Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “It isn’t a coincidence that skepticism about climate change tends to be the preserve of the nationalist right. You rarely see left-wing socialists tweet that “climate change is a Chinese hoax.” Since there is no national answer to the problem of global warming, some nationalist politicians prefer to believe the problem does not exist.15.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

402. “I encourage all of us, whatever our beliefs, to question the basic narratives of our world, to connect past developments with present concerns, and not to be afraid of controversial issues.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

403. “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

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

405. “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

406. “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

407. “Radical Islam is in a far worse position than socialism. It has not yet come to terms even with the Industrial Revolution.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

408. “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

409. “History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses. Ten.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

410. “Total annihilation has a way of sharpening people’s minds.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

411. “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

412. “The Hindu caste system and its attendant laws of purity became deeply embedded in Indian culture. Long after the Indo-Aryan invasion was forgotten, Indians continued to believe in the caste system and to abhor the pollution caused by caste mixing.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

413. “Una de las pocas leyes rigurosas de la historia es que los lujos tienden a convertirse en necesidades y a generar nuevas obligaciones.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

414. “The currency of evolution is neither hunger nor pain, but rather copies of DNA helixes. Just as the economic success of a company is measured only by the number of dollars in its bank account, not by the happiness of its employees, so the evolutionary success of a species is measured by the number of copies of its DNA.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

415. “When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

416. “One of the wonderful things about science is that when scientists don’t know something, they can try out all kinds of theories and conjunctures, but in the end they can just admit their ignorance. The.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

417. “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.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

418. “Yet in the case of animals such as cattle, sheep and Sapiens, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, we have to consider how evolutionary success translates into individual experience. In the following chapters we will see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

419. “Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

420. “When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged. Even today many refuse to believe it. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

421. “Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease and fatigue than men.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

422. “But fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

423. “You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

424. “Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

425. “As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

426. “How does modern science relate to religion? It seems that people have already said a million times everything there is to say about this question. Yet in practice, science and religion are like a husband and wife who after 500 years of marriage counselling still don’t know each other. He still dreams about Cinderella and she keeps pining for Prince Charming, while they argue about whose turn it is to take out the rubbish.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

428. “How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

429. “War is obsolete You are more likely to commit suicide than be killed in conflict Famine is disappearing You are at more risk of obesity than starvation Death is just a technical problem Equality is out – but immortality is in What does our future hold?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

430. “Individual humans know embarrassingly little about the world, and as history has progressed, they have come to know less and less. A hunter-gatherer in the Stone Age knew how to make her own clothes, how to start a fire, how to hunt rabbits, and how to escape lions. We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less. We rely on the expertise of others for almost all our needs.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

431. “Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of “culturists.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

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

— Yuval Noah Harari

433. “Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. 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.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

434. “So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

435. “Those living in palaces have always had different agendas to those living in shacks, and that is unlikely to change in the twenty-first century.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

436. “Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

437. “So our medieval ancestors were happy because they found meaning to life in collective delusions about the afterlife? Yes. As long as nobody punctured their fantasies, why shouldn’t they?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

438. “One potential remedy for human stupidity is a dose of humility. National, religious and cultural tensions are made worse by the grandiose feeling that my nation, my religion and my culture are the most important in the world – hence my interests should come before the interests of anyone else, or of humankind as a whole. How can we make nations, religions and cultures a bit more realistic and modest about their true place in the world?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

439. “Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

440. “Humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

441. “People easily understand that ‘primitives’ cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

442. “Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

443. “How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

444. “If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

445. “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

446. “Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

447. “Would the book of Genesis have declared that Neanderthals descend from Adam and Eve, would Jesus have died for the sins of the Denisovans, and would the Qur’an have reserved seats in heaven for all righteous humans, whatever their species?”

— Yuval Noah Harari

448. “Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

449. “Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”

— Yuval Noah Harari

450. “Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature.’ But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed.”

— Yuval Noah Harari