Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

We hardly notice how ubiquitous our stuff is until we have to move it to a new house.

am depressed because I am being exploited by capitalists, and because under the prevailing social system I have no chance of realising my aims, the therapist may well say that I am projecting onto 'the social system' my own inner difficulties, and I am projecting onto 'the capitalists' unresolved issues with my mother.

Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will instensify

Por qué hay algo, en lugar de nada? ¿Qué modeló las leyes fundamentales de la física? ¿Qué es la conciencia y de dónde procede? No tenemos respuestas para estas preguntas, y damos a nuestra ignorancia el nombre grandioso de Dios.

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.

FIGURA 20. Un cartel de propaganda nazi que muestra a la derecha un «ario racialmente puro» y a la izquierda una persona de «raza mezclada». La admiración de los nazis por el cuerpo humano es evidente, como lo es su temor a que las razas inferiores pudieran contaminar a la humanidad y causar su degeneración.

Humans are destabilizing the global biosphere on multiple fronts. We are taking more and more resources out of the environment while pumping back into it enormous quantities of waste and poison, thereby changing the composition of the soil, the water, and the atmosphere

Officials kept writing scrolls, collecting taxes, sending orders and oiling the gears of the pharaonic machine.

were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.

Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.

There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along. There is no proof that cultures that are beneficial to humans must inexorably succeed and spread, while less beneficial cultures disappear

nunca convenceremos a un mono para que nos dé un plátano con la promesa de que después de morir tendrá un número ilimitado de bananas a su disposición en el cielo de los monos. Pero

Technology is never deterministic, and the fact that something can be done does not mean it must be done.

The better we understand the biochemical mechanisms that underpin human emotions, desires, and choices, the better computers can become in analyzing human behavior, predicting human decisions, and replacing human drivers, bankers, and lawyers

The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.

the numbers from 0 to 9. Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe.

The basic plot of almost all movies and novels about AI revolves around the magical moment when a computer or a robot gains consciousness.

Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, learn new things, and preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations.

to plunder, slaughter and robbery they give the lying name of empire;

What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers to this question: modern science and capitalism.

Dayananda's contemporary, Pope Pius IX, had much more conservative views about women, but shared Dayananda's admiration for superhuman authority. Pius led a series of reforms in Catholic dogma and established the novel principle of papal infallibility, according to which the Pope can never err in matters of faith (this seemingly medieval idea became binding Catholic dogma only in 1870, eleven years after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species).

Comer helado es agradable. Encontrar el amor verdadero es más agradable. ¿Cree el lector que si comemos suficiente helado, el placer acumulado podría llegar a equipararse con el embeleso del amor verdadero?

The most important economic resource is trust in the future, and this resource is constantly threatened by thieves and charlatans.

A la mañana siguiente de la batalla de Waterloo (1815), junto a los hospitales de campaña podían verse montones de manos y piernas serrados. En aquellos tiempos, a los carpinteros y carniceros que se alistaban en el ejército se les solía destinar a servir en el cuerpo médico, porque la cirugía requería poca cosa más que saberse manejar con cuchillos y sierras.