Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

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.

For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation.

Peasants had to work harder than foragers to eke out less varied and nutritious food, and they were far more exposed to disease and exploitation.

If I don't update my body's anti-virus program regularly, I will wake up one day to discover that the millions of nano-robots coursing through my veins are now controlled by a North Korean hacker.

Until the Cognitive Revolution, the doings of all human species belonged to the realm of biology, or, if you so prefer, prehistory

Throughout this book, I often use the first person to speak about the future of humankind. I talk about what 'we' need to do about 'our' problems. But maybe there are no 'we'. Maybe one of 'our' biggest problems is that different human groups have completely different futures. Maybe in some parts of the world you should teach your children to write computer codes, while in others you had better teach them to draw fast and shoot straight.

How can I find a firm ethical ground in a world that extends far beyond my horizons, that spins completely out of human control, and that holds all gods and ideologies suspect?

commandment is to link everything to the system, including heretics who don't want to be plugged

it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms, and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens.

from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose.

The decline of violence is due largely to the rise of the state. Throughout history, most violence resulted from local feuds between families and communities. (Even today, as the above figures indicate, local crime is a far deadlier threat than international wars.)

and there are even cases of religiously inspired human sacrifice.

the notion that you have a single self and that you could therefore distinguish your authentic desires from alien voices is just another liberal myth, debunked by the latest scientific research.

los humanos deben extraer de sus experiencias internas no solo el sentido de su propia vida, sino también el sentido del universo entero.

They had physical dexterity that people today are unable to achieve even after years of practising yoga or t'ai chi.

threat of job losses does not result merely from the rise of infotech. It results from the confluence of infotech with biotech.

La escritura nació como la criada de la conciencia humana, pero cada vez más se está convirtiendo en su dueña y señora.

A real 'clash of civilisations' is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying.

Qué tipo de culturas, sociedades y estructuras políticas habrían surgido en un mundo en el que coexistían varias especies humanas diferentes?

A real 'clash of civilisations' is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf.

Around AD 1500, history made its most momentous choice, changing not only the fate of humankind, but arguably the fate of all life on earth. We call it the Scientific Revolution. It began in western Europe, a large peninsula on the western tip of Afro-Asia, which up till then played no important role in history.

Modernity is a deal. All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die. Very few of us can ever rescind or transcend this deal. It shapes our food, our jobs and our dreams, and it decides where we dwell, whom we love and how we pass away.

Conversely, the greatest sin would be to block the dataflow. What is death, if not a condition in which information doesn't flow?

Rather, happiness consists in seeing one's life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.