Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate

We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science—but we are still stuck with only national politics.

The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith.

It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.

Two particularly important nonhuman abilities that AI possesses are connectivity and updatability.

Secular ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep appreciation of suffering.

For example, the chief goddess of Celtic Ireland prior to the coming of Christianity was Brigid. When Ireland was Christianised, Brigid too was baptised. She became St Brigit, who to this day is the most revered saint in Catholic Ireland.

The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.

history does not tolerate a vacuum. If incidences of famine, plague and war are decreasing, something is bound to take their place on the human agenda. We

The immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call 'cultures'. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call 'history'.

The Bible decrees that 'If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife' (Deuteronomy 22:28–9). The ancient Hebrews considered this a reasonable arrangement

As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife. Even in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997 to create a legal category of marital rape.5

You cannot experience something if you don't have the necessary sensitivity, and you cannot develop your sensitivity except by undergoing a long string of experiences.

In the US, the technical term for a limited liability company is a 'corporation', which is ironic, because the term derives from 'corpus' ('body' in Latin) – the one thing these corporations lack.

But humans do such things all the time. Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

The twin commitments to truth and compassion result also in a commitment to equality.

Zealous nationalists who cry "Our country first!" should ask themselves whether their country by itself, without a robust system of international cooperation, can protect the world—or even itself—from nuclear destruction.

Europeans should show tolerance toward the immigrants too, and allow them as much freedom as possible to follow their own traditions, provided these do not harm the freedoms and rights of other people.

The NSA may be spying on our every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows what to do with all the data. Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.

In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. 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.

Instead of praying for miracles, we need to ask what we can do to help.

Adam and Eve never existed, but Chartres Cathedral is still beautiful. Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous, and creative—just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace, and the Harry Potter books.

Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.