Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

People are egalitarian by nature, and unequal societies can never function well due to resentment and dissatisfaction.

Despite all our achievements, we feel a constant pressure to do and produce even more.

The European empires believed that in order to govern effectively they must know the languages and cultures of their subjects. British officers arriving in India were supposed to spend up to three years in a Calcutta college, where they studied Hindu and Muslim law alongside English law; Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian alongside Greek and Latin; and Tamil, Bengali and Hindustani culture alongside mathematics, economics and geography.

Geneticists claim to have isolated the genes responsible for vole monogamy. If the addition of a gene can turn a vole Don Juan into a loyal and loving husband, are we far off from being able to genetically engineer not only the individual abilities of rodents (and humans), but also their social structures?

Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined. When the Agricultural Revolution opened opportunities for the creation of crowded cities and mighty empires, people invented stories about great gods, motherlands and joint stock companies to provide the needed social links. While human evolution was crawling at its usual snail's pace, the human imagination was building astounding networks of mass cooperation, unlike any other ever seen on earth.

The earth of a hundred millennia ago was walked by at least six different species of man.

Quando forçamos o riso, usamos músculos e circuitos cerebrais diferentes dos que acionamos quando algo nos faz rir de verdade. Os seres humanos, em geral, não dão pela diferença. Mas um sensor biométrico conseguiria detetá-la.

All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences

El libre albedrío existe únicamente en los relatos imaginarios que los humanos hemos inventado.

Modern culture has nevertheless been willing to embrace ignorance to a much greater degree than has any previous culture. One of the things that has made it possible for modern social orders to hold together is the spread of an almost religious belief in technology and in the methods of scientific research, which have replaced to some extent the belief in absolute truths.

journalists who inform society about and thus protect it from cheats and freeloaders. Most

Hayvan-insan ili?kisi, gelecekte süperinsanlarla insanlar aras?nda kurulacak ili?kiye en yak?n model olma özelli?i ta??r. Süperzeki siborglar?n etten kemikten, s?radan insanlara nas?l davranaca??n? m? merak ediyorsunuz? ?nsanlar?n daha az zeki hayvan akrabalar?na nas?l davrand???yla ba?lamak sa?l?kl? olabilir.

We normally think that theist religions sanctified the great gods. We tend to forget that they sanctified humans, too. Hitherto Homo sapiens had been just one actor in a cast of thousands. In the new theist drama Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe revolved.

los humanos poseen una maravillosa capacidad para creer en contradicciones. De manera que no debería ser ninguna sorpresa que millones de piadosos cristianos, musulmanes y judíos consigan creer a la vez en un Dios omnipotente y en un Diablo independiente.

The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island. Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological

El pánico es una forma de arrogancia

If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer. The exact details don't really matter. Any story is wrong, simply for being a story. The universe just does not work like a story.

O sucesso não é garantido. Os indivíduos do sexo masculino, em particular, vivem um temor constante de perder sua afirmação de masculinidade. Durante toda a história, estiveram dispostos a arriscar e até mesmo sacrificar a vida, apenas para que as pessoas dissessem: "Ele é um homem de verdade!".

Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the stronger the story becomes, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

When Kushim's neighbours called out to him, they might really have shouted 'Kushim!' It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.

Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.1

Homo sapiens can speak about things that don't really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Meaning is created when many people weave together a common network of stories.

Written language may have been conceived as a modest way of describing reality, but it gradually became a powerful way to reshape reality. When official reports collided with objective reality, it was often reality that had to give way.