Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

The human care industry – which takes care of the sick, the young and the elderly – is likely to remain a human bastion for a long time. Indeed, as people live longer and have fewer children, care of the elderly will probably be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the human labour market.

That's why counterfeiting money has always been considered a much more serious crime than other acts of deception. Counterfeiting is not just cheating – it's a breach of sovereignty, an act of subversion against the power, privileges and person of the king. The legal term is lese-majesty (violating majesty), and was typically punished by torture and death.

Hence the first religious effect of the Agricultural revolution was to turn plants and animals from equal members of a spiritual round table into property

If Ugandan politicians think that the power that created the cosmos, the galaxies and the black holes becomes terribly upset whenever two Homo sapiens males have a bit of fun together, then science can help disabuse them of this rather bizarre notion.

Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done. Government regulation can successfully block new technologies even if they are commercially viable and economically lucrative.

the details of every legal proceeding

Friends giving advice often tell each other, 'Follow your heart.' But the heart is a double agent that usually takes its instructions from the dominant myths of the day, and the very recommendation to 'follow your heart' was implanted in our minds by a combination of nineteenth-century Romantic myths and twentieth-century consumerist myths.

What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.

so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?

The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any

the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians.

Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.

Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology.

A falta de las almas eternas y de un Dios Creador, a los liberales les resulta embarazosamente difícil explicar qué es lo que tiene de tan especial el sapiens individual.

It makes no difference what your particular path is, as long as you follow it. A washerwoman who devotedly follows the way of the washerwoman is far superior to a prince who strays off the way of the prince. Having understood the meaning of life, Arjuna duly proceeds to follow his dharma as a warrior. He kills his friends and relatives, leads his army to victory, and becomes one of the most esteemed and beloved heroes of the Hindu world.

What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records. They also invested in schools for scribes, clerks, librarians and accountants.

Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.

Dios. El sacerdote exclamaba «Hoc est corpus meum!» («¡Este es mi cuerpo!»), y, ¡abracadabra!, el pan se convertía en la carne de Cristo.

Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality. If democracy were a matter of rational decision-making, there would be absolutely no reason to give all people equal voting rights – or perhaps any voting rights at all.

Los científicos no saben cómo un conjunto de señales eléctricas en el cerebro crea experiencias subjetivas. Y, lo que es más importante, tampoco saben cuál podría ser el beneficio evolutivo de semejante fenómeno. Es la mayor laguna en nuestra comprensión de la vida.

Qualities considered masculine are more valued than those considered feminine, and members of a society who personify the feminine ideal get less than those who exemplify the masculine ideal.

The rich are taught to disregard the poor, while the poor are taught to disregard their true interests. No amount of self-reflection or psychotherapy will help, because the psychotherapists are also working for the capitalist system.

Less fortunate members of the old animist system lost their stature and became either extras or silent decor in the great drama of man's relationship with the gods

Even the Roman Empire – the only important premodern European empire – derived most of its wealth from its North African, Balkan and Middle Eastern provinces. Rome's western European provinces were a poor Wild West, which contributed little aside from minerals and slaves. Northern Europe was so desolate and barbarous that it wasn't even worth conquering.