Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

The Cognitive Revolution is accordingly the point when history declared its independence from biology.

Success is not guaranteed. Males in particular live in constant dread of losing their claim to manhood. Throughout history, males have been willing to risk and even sacrifice their lives, just so that people will say 'He's a real man!

Maybe it isn't so important whether people's expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants?

There is little sense, then, in arguing that the natural function of women is to give birth, or that homosexuality is unnatural. Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define manhood and womanhood reflect human imagination more than biological reality.

If I believe in God at all, it is my choice to believe. If my inner self tells me to believe in God- then I believe. I believe because I fell God's presence, and my heart tells me He is there. But if I no longer feel God's presence, and if my heart suddenly tells me that there is no God-I will cease believing. Either way, the real source of authority is my own feelings. So even while saying that I believe in God, the truth is that I have a much stronger belief in my own inner voice.

patient. Therefore we will probably have an AI family doctor on our smartphone decades before we have a reliable nurse robot.9 The human care industry—which takes care of the sick, the young, and the elderly—is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time.

Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments--whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues--placed unity above truth. That's why they were so powerful.

Organs evolve to perform a particular function, but once they exist, they can be adapted for other usages as well. Mouths, for example, appeared because the earliest multicellular organisms needed a way to take nutrients into their bodies. We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades.

The average person in Jericho of 8500 BC lived a harder life than the average person in Jericho of 9500 BC or 13,000 BC. But nobody realised what was happening. Every generation continued to live like the previous generation, making only small improvements here and there in the way things were done. Paradoxically, a series of 'improvements', each of which was meant to make life easier, added up to a millstone around the necks of these farmers.

online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals – a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step towards uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.

It takes a tribe to raise a human. Evolution thus favored those capable of forming strong social ties.

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to these fragile structures. Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice, but are ordained by an absolute and supreme authority. This helps place at least some fundamental laws beyond challenge, thereby ensuring social stability.

Did you ever vote about the internet?

Yet it is an iron rule of history that every imagined hierarchy disavows its fictional origins and claims to be natural and inevitable.

In the late twentieth century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because democracies were better at data processing.

Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future.

The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe. This is my cosmic vocation. I have no fixed destiny or dharma. If I find myself in Simba's or Arjuna's shoes, I can choose to fight for the crown of a kingdom, but I don't have to. I can just as well join a wandering circus, go to Broadway to sing in a musical, or move to Silicon Valley and launch a start-up. I am free to create my own dharma.

Today science fiction is the most important artistic genre. It shapes the understanding of the public on things like artificial intelligence and biotechnology, which are likely to change our lives and society more than anything else in the coming decades.

A rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more satisfied than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce juicy steaks.

Cuanto más hemos trabajado para construir algo, más difícil es abandonarlo y hacer sitio a algo nuevo.

concepts of pollution and purity have played a leading role in enforcing social and political divisions and have been exploited by numerous ruling classes to maintain their privileges.

Suffering emerges because people fail to appreciate this. They believe that there is some eternal essence somewhere, and if they can only find it and connect to it, they will be completely satisfied. This eternal essence is sometimes called God, sometimes the nation, sometimes the soul, sometimes the authentic self, and sometimes true love – and the more people are attached to it, the more disappointed and miserable they become due to the failure to find it.

Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.

If any scientist wants to argue that subjective experiences are irrelevant, their challenge is to explain why torture or rape are wrong without reference to any subjective experience.