Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was worse than ludicrous – it was hubris.

After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans – not jobs.

Los pocos milenios que separan la revolución agrícola de la aparición de ciudades, reinos e imperios no fueron suficientes para permitir la evolución de un instinto de cooperación en masa.

desde la revolución cognitiva, los sapiens han vivido en una realidad dual. Por un lado, la realidad objetiva de los ríos, los árboles y los leones; y por el otro, la realidad imaginada de los dioses, las naciones y las corporaciones. A medida que pasaba el tiempo, la realidad imaginada se hizo cada vez más poderosa, de modo que en la actualidad la supervivencia de ríos, árboles y leones depende de la gracia de entidades imaginadas tales como dioses, naciones y corporaciones.

As money beings down the fans of community, religion and state, the world is in danger of becoming one big and rather heartless marketplace

In a one-on-one brawl, a Neanderthal would probably have beaten a Sapiens. But in a conflict of hundreds, Neanderthals wouldn't stand a chance. Neanderthals could share information about the whereabouts of lions, but they probably could not tell – and revise – stories about tribal spirits. Without an ability to compose fiction, Neanderthals were unable to cooperate effectively in large numbers, nor could they adapt their social behaviour to rapidly changing challenges.

It is particularly important to stress that possibilities which seem very unlikely to contemporaries often get realised. (p. 266)

country devoid of natural resources, but which enjoys peace, a fair judicial system and a free government is likely to receive a high credit rating. As such, it may be able to raise enough cheap capital to support a good education system and foster a flourishing high-tech industry. The

But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

la fusión de la infotecnología y la biotecnología abre la puerta a un sinfín de situaciones hipotéticas sobre el tema del fin del mundo, que van de las dictaduras digitales a la creación de una clase inútil global.

fictional entities as the dollar, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the totemic trademarks of corporations.

The farm thus became the prototype of new societies, complete with puffed-up masters, inferior races fit for exploitation, wild beasts ripe for extermination and a great God above that gives His blessing to the entire arrangement.

The Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita relates how in the midst of a murderous civil war, the great warrior prince Arjuna is consumed with doubt. Seeing his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he hesitates over whether to fight and kill them. He begins to wonder what good and evil are, who decided it, and what the purpose of human life is.

Yet none of these things exists 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. People

Among all the world's large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah's Ark.

Terrorism is mostly theater. It is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real power. During the past decade, terrorists killed every year just a few dozen people in the United States. At the same time, obesity and related illnesses killed tens of thousands of Americans annually. For the average American, Coca-Cola and McDonald's pose a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don't need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.

Finns det något farligare än missnöjda och oansvariga gudar som inte riktigt vet vad de vill?

En Homo sapiens, el cerebro supone el 2-3 por ciento del peso corporal total, pero consume el 25 por ciento de la energía corporal cuando el cuerpo está en reposo.

if you want reliable information, pay good money for it.

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. People easily understand that 'primitives' cement their social order by believing in ghosts and spirits, and gathering each full moon to dance together around the campfire. What we fail to appreciate is that our modern institutions function on exactly the same basis. Take

Buying cars and writing novels do not change our biochemistry.

Despite the benefits of fire, 150,000 years ago humans were still marginal creatures. They could now scare away lions, warm themselves during cold nights, and burn down the occasional forest.