Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

Bust most experts think on a timescale of academic grants and college jobs. Hence, 'very far away' may mean twenty years, 'never' may denote no more than fifty

Though many traditional religions espouse universal values and claim cosmic validity, at present they are used mainly as the handmaid of modern nationalism – whether in North Korea, Russia, Iran or Israel. They therefore make it even harder to transcend national differences and find a global solution to the threats of nuclear war, ecological collapse and technological disruption.

other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. 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.

In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves. 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. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade.

what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences.

every routine is an invitation for disruption, every hierarchy an invitation for revolution.

if some issue seems exceptionally important to you, make the effort to read the relevant scientific literature.

If you get your news for free, you might well be the product.

In 2016, despite wars in Syria, Ukraine, and several other hot spots, fewer people died from human violence than from obesity, car accidents, or suicide.

With regard to other animals, humans have long since become gods. We don't like to reflect on this too deeply, because we have not been particularly just or merciful gods.

I choose to want to. This is of course false. I don't choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly.

As bureaucracies accumulate power, they become immune to their own mistakes. Instead of changing their stories to fit reality, they can change reality to fit their stories. In

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.

It turned out that our choices of everything from food to mates result not from some mysterious free will, but rather from billions of neurons calculating probabilities within a split second. Vaunted 'human intuition' is in reality 'pattern recognition'.3

We think we know far more today, but as individuals, we actually know far less.

The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what's going on.

Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, 'us vs them', and to foresee the potential unity of humankind.

There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. The wealth resides in the minds of Google engineers and Hollywood script doctors, directors and special-effects wizards, who would be on the first plane to Bangalore or Mumbai long before the Chinese tanks rolled into Sunset Boulevard.

But we don't have much experience in regulating the ownership of data,

the realest thing in the world is suffering.

Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware. They might be trying to disguise and excuse real suffering by wrapping it up in big, incomprehensible words.

The only sure way to stop global warming is to stop economic growth, which no government is willing to do.

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

there are so many contradictory accounts that it is hard to know what to believe.