Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

At present the meat industry not only inflicts untold misery on billions of sentient beings but is also one of the chief causes of global warming, one of the main consumers of antibiotics and poison, and one of the foremost polluters of air, land, and water.

It would be wrong to tar all anti-immigrationists as "fascists," just as it would be wrong to depict all pro-immigrationists as committed to "cultural suicide.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn't a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.

Your feelings are the voice of millions of ancestors, each of whom managed to survive and reproduce in an unforgiving environment. Your

In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, are in a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all. Everything is perfectly clear. To be suddenly left without any story is terrifying. Nothing makes any sense.

There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell.

despite the numerous shortcomings of the liberal package, it has a much better record than any of its alternatives

We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society.

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.

Technology has changed everything by creating a set of global existential threats that no nation can solve on its own.

A priest is not somebody who knows how to perform the rain dance and end the drought. A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.

By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed "the End of History," confidently asserting that all the big political and economic questions of the past had been settled and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets, and government welfare services remained the only game in town.

So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of "attention merchants."2 They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services, and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers.

It would be extremely unfortunate if the European experiment in freedom and tolerance unraveled due to an overblown fear of terrorists.

Unfortunately, the evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.

if you happen to live in a country whose leader routinely says things like "Their sacrifice will redeem the purity of our eternal nation," know that you are in deep trouble. To preserve your sanity, always try to translate such hogwash into real terms: a soldier crying out in agony, a woman beaten and brutalized, a child shaking in fear.

When it comes to climate, countries are just not sovereign. They are at the mercy of actions taken by people on the other side of the planet.

Each of these three problems—nuclear war, ecological collapse, and technological disruption—is enough to threaten the future of human civilization. But taken together, they add up to an unprecedented existential crisis, especially because they are likely to reinforce and compound one another.

all power is concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite while most people suffer not from exploitation but from something far worse—irrelevance.

Terrorism is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to dominate global politics?

When we adopt the proverbial bird's-eye view of history, which examines developments in terms of decades or centuries, it's hard to say whether history moves in the direction of unity or of diversity.

some people who know next to nothing about meteorology or biology nevertheless propose policies regarding climate change and genetically modified crops, while others hold extremely strong views about what should be done in Iraq or Ukraine without being able to locate these countries on a map.

Once algorithms choose and buy things for us, the traditional advertising industry will go bust.