Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

Con la aparición de la escritura empezamos a oír la historia a través de los oídos de sus protagonistas. Cuando los vecinos de Kushim lo llamaban, podían haber gritado realmente «¡Kushim!». Es revelador que el primer nombre registrado en la historia pertenezca a un contable, y no a un profeta, un poeta o un gran conquistador.

Five modern freighters could have taken onboard all the cargo borne by the whole world's merchant fleets.5

Particularly in a xenophobic dog-eats-dog world, if even a single country chooses to pursue a high-risk, high-gain technological path, other countries will be forced to do the same, because nobody can afford to remain behind. In order to avoid such a race to the bottom, humankind will probably need some kind of global identity and loyalty.

how to avoid brainwashing and how to distinguish reality from fiction. Here I would like to offer two simple rules of thumb.

off, directly or indirectly, hundreds of species of birds, insects, snails and other local inhabitants. From there, the wave of extinction moved gradually to the east, the south and the north, into the heart of the Pacific Ocean, obliterating on its way the unique fauna of Samoa and Tonga (1200 BC); the Marquis Islands (AD 1); Easter Island, the Cook Islands and Hawaii (AD 500); and finally New Zealand (AD 1200).

just as in 1914 the murder of an Austrian archduke sparked the First World War, so in 2018 some incident in the Syrian desert or an unwise move in the Korean peninsula might ignite a global conflict.

When the first Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant ground sloths that weighed up to eight tons and reached a height of twenty feet.

Cognitive dissonance is often considered a failure of the human psyche. In fact, it is a vital asset. Had people been unable to hold contradictory beliefs and values, it would probably have been impossible to establish and maintain any human culture.

None of the things exist outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. 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.

Following Homo sapiens, domesticated cattle, pigs and sheep are the second, third and fourth most widespread large mammals in the world. From a narrow evolutionary perspective, which measures success by the number of DNA copies, the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful boon for chickens, cattle, pigs and sheep. Unfortunately,

Not that everything is possible.

There is no justice in history

humains ont toujours excellé à inventer des outils, beaucoup moins à en faire un usage avisé. Il est plus facile de manipuler un fleuve en construisant un barrage qu'il ne l'est de prédire toutes les conséquences complexes que cela aura pour le système écologique plus large. De même sera-t-il plus facile de rediriger le flux de nos esprits que d'en deviner l'impact sur notre psychologie personnelle ou nos systèmes sociaux.

The idea of equality is inextricably intertwined with the idea of creation. The

monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over

Having accepted that life has no meaning, I find meaning in explaining this truth to others, arguing with the unbelievers, giving lectures to the skeptics, donating money to build monasteries, and so on.

War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does.

Por desgracia, enseñar a los chicos a aceptar lo desconocido y a mantener su equilibrio mental es muchísimo más difícil que enseñarles una ecuación de física o las causas de la Primera Guerra Mundial.

Even if war is catastrophic for everyone, no god and no law of nature protect us from human stupidity.

Today, when we finally realise that the keys to happiness are in the hands of our biochemical system, we can stop wasting our time on politics and social reforms, putsches and ideologies, and focus instead on the only thing that can make us truly happy: manipulating our biochemistry.

In the Pacific Ocean, the main wave of extinction began in about 1500 BC, when Polynesian farmers settled the Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Caledonia. They killed

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons.

The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus' journey to America or the Apollo II expedition to the moon.

We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbor-- we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust. As money brings down the dams of community, religion and state, the world is in danger of becoming one big and rather heartless marketplace.