Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings.

Fiction isn't bad. It is vital.

When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it gives you a choice: "Either the story is true or I am a gullible fool." When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: "Either the story is true or I am a cruel villain." And just as we don't want to admit we are fools, we also don't want to admit we are villains. We prefer to believe that the story is true.

Family and community seem to have more impact on our happiness than money and health.

one of the most important obligations for spiritual wanderers is to challenge the beliefs and conventions of dominant religions. In Zen Buddhism it is said that 'If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.' Which means that if while walking on the spiritual path you encounter the rigid ideas and fixed laws of institutionalised Buddhism,

world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry.

Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother. Skeletons

A good rule of thumb is 'Biology enables, Culture forbids.

in the long run no job will remain absolutely safe from automation.

This cosmic data-processing system would be like God. It will be everywhere and will control everything, and humans are destined to merge into it.

mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

En un mundo inundado de información irrelevante, la claridad es poder.

Yet over decades and centuries the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants.

El humanismo es la creencia de que Homo sapiens tiene una naturaleza única y sagrada, que es fundamentalmente diferente de la naturaleza de todos los demás animales y de todos los otros fenómenos.

John Watson, una autoridad reconocida de la puericultura en la década de 1920, advertía severamente a los padres: «No abracéis ni beséis nunca [a vuestros hijos], no dejéis nunca que se sienten en vuestro regazo.

Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly.

Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a 'legal fiction'. It can't be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity

When you force yourself to laugh, you use different brain circuits and muscles than when you laugh because something is really funny. Humans cannot usually detect the difference. But a biometric sensor could.9

Tangan-tangan tambahan itu teramat diperlukan di ladang-ladang. Namun mulut-mulut ekstra itu dengan cepat menghabiskan surplus makanan, sehingga lebih banyak lagi ladang yang harus ditanami.

The most important thing I realised was that the deepest source of my suffering is in the patterns of my own mind. When I want something and it doesn't happen, my mind reacts by generating suffering. Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step towards ceasing to generate more suffering.

The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

But evolution has no purpose.

desde el punto de vista del rebaño, y no del pastor, es difícil evitar la impresión de que para la inmensa mayoría de los animales domésticos la revolución agrícola fue una catástrofe terrible. Su «éxito» evolutivo carece de importancia. Un rinoceronte salvaje que se halle al borde de la extinción está probablemente más satisfecho que un ternero que pasa su corta vida dentro de una caja minúscula, y que es engordado para producir jugosos bistecs.

To stay relevant—not just economically but above all socially—you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.