Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

Predicting that humankind will try to gain immortality, bliss and divinity is much like predicting that people building a house will want a lawn in their front yard. It sounds very likely. But once you say it out loud, you can begin to think about alternatives.

Modern humanity is sick with FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out – and though we have more choice than ever before, we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose.

In the end it was communism that collapsed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag.

The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill.

When agriculture and industry came along people could increasingly rely on the skills of others for survival, and new 'niches for imbeciles' were opened up.

We therefore have a good chance of overcoming the problem of resource scarcity. The real nemesis of the modern economy is ecological collapse. Both scientific progress and economic growth take place within a brittle biosphere, and as they gather steam, so the shock waves destabilise the ecology. In

Today, the society called New Zealand is composed of 4.5 million Sapiens and 50 million sheep.

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order.

You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.

The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.

If tensions, conflicts and irresolvable dilemmas are the spice of every culture, a human being who belongs to any particular culture must hold contradictory beliefs and be riven by incompatible values.

Patriarchy has been the norm in almost all agricultural and industrial societies. It has tenaciously weathered political upheavals, social revolutions and economic transformations.

By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.8

Justice demands not just a set of abstract values, but also an understanding of concrete cause-and-effect relations.

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.

Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreement

The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses.

I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that's exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that's a religion, and we are admonished not to call it "fake news" in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).

In order to provide every person in the world with the same standard of living as affluent Americans, we would need a few more planets – but we have only this one. If progress and growth do end up destroying the ecosystem, the cost will be dear not merely to vampires, foxes and rabbits, but also to Sapiens.

It turns 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.

How can we act morally when we have no way of knowing all the relevant facts?

greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed but even more so from ignorance and indifference.

If we knew how many species we've already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive.

The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge. Over