Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

It is a cliché to note that the personal is the political, but in an era when scientists, corporations, and governments are learning to hack the human brain, this truism is more sinister than ever.

There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

For centuries humanism has been convincing us that we are the ultimate source of meaning, and that our free will is therefore the highest authority of all.

Whenever politicians start talking in mystical terms, beware.

great power inevitably distorts the truth.

But looking at the historical facts, Homo sapiens most closely resembles an ecological serial killer

When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged.

Most of what they currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are forty. Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.

Up until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of military revolutions were the product of organisational rather than technological changes.

Can a nation really suffer? Has a nation eyes, hands, senses, affections and passions? If you prick it, can it bleed? Obviously not. If it is defeated in war, loses a province, or even forfeits its independence, still it cannot experience pain, sadness or any other kind of misery, for it has no body, no mind, and no feelings whatsoever. In truth, it is just a metaphor.

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.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

We moderns have an arsenal of tranquillisers and painkillers at our disposal, but our expectations of ease and pleasure, and our intolerance of inconvenience and discomfort, have increased to such an extent that we may well suffer from pain more than our ancestors ever did.

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.

ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real.

For real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war.

If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history. When evaluating global happiness, is it wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men? Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

scientists has recently mapped the genome of ancient mammoths, found frozen in the Siberian ice. They now plan to take a fertilised egg-cell of a present-day elephant, replace the elephantine DNA with a reconstructed mammoth DNA, and implant the egg in the womb of an elephant. After about twenty-two months, they expect the first mammoth in 5,000 years to be born.9

most up-to-date theories also maintain that sensations and emotions are biochemical data-processing algorithms.

So what should we be teaching? 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.

The earth's surface measures about 200 million square miles, of which 60 million is land. As late as AD 1400, the vast majority of farmers, along with their plants and animals, clustered together in an area of just 4.25 million square miles – 2 per cent of the planet's surface.

At the end of the Middle Ages, slavery was almost unknown in Christian Europe. During the early modern period, the rise of European capitalism went hand in hand with the rise of the Atlantic slave trade.

We want to believe that our lives have some objective meaning, and that our sacrifices matter to something beyond the stories in our head. Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.

Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste. They may be fiercely anti-European in their rhetoric, but almost everyone on the planet views politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes, and listens to music written in European modes with words in European languages. Even today's burgeoning Chinese economy, which may soon regain its global primacy, is built on a European model of production and finance.