Words matter. These are the best Yuval Noah Harari Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I was taught that if you’re going to study something, you must understand it deeply and be familiar with primary sources. But if you write a history of the whole world, you can’t do this. That’s the trade-off.
Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.
We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with human rights, and we do the same thing with money.
Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.
If you don’t like the word ‘religion,’ you can replace it with ‘ideology’ – it’s largely the same thing. At the heart of both religion and ideology is the question of authority and where authority is coming from.
The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it.
Increasingly, our decisions will be made by the algorithms that surround us. Whenever there is a big dilemma, you just ask Google what to do. And what kind of life is that?
For thousands of years, we have gained the power to control the world outside us but not to control the world inside. You could stop a river from flowing, but you could not stop your body from becoming old. You could kill mosquitoes, but you could not kill annoying thoughts buzzing inside your head.
Fundamentally, mankind was unimportant in the ecological system. Then, in one fell swoop, an evolutionary blink of an eye, the human race is transformed from something unimportant to the most important thing in the world.
All animals communicate. What’s special about gossip is that it’s not about the here and now. You don’t gossip about lions. You don’t gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people – this is the basis for forming larger communities.
As a historian, I’m sceptical about conspiracy theories because the world is far too complicated to be managed by a few billionaires drinking scotch behind some closed doors. But I do think that the voters are correct in sensing that they’re really losing power. And in reaction, they give the system an angry kick.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia.
I’m a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future.
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness.
What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.
About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.
In 1989, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, it seemed that the liberal story had won. The liberal story says that humankind is inevitably marching towards a global society of free markets and democratic politics.
Buddhism maintains that the common reaction of the human mind to pleasure and to achievement is not satisfaction; it’s craving for more.
Ignorance is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, then this is a toxic mix.
I try to be a realist and not a pessimist or an optimist.
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
We did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated us.
Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill.
When you look at the growth of the human economy and its expected growth in the twenty-first century, I expect health will be the most important market of all. Especially as we move from a concept of health which focuses on healing the sick to a concept of upgrading the healthy.
For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don’t see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.
If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.
Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all.
Humans are extremely good in acquiring new power, but they are not very good in translating this power into greater happiness, which is why we are far more powerful than ever before but we don’t seem to be much happier.
What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster. If Amazon knows you better than you know yourself, then the game is up.
The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness… but we have no idea how or why this happens. I’m afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.
The feelings of the individual are the prime authority in ethics. ‘If it feels good, do it’ is the basic ethical ideal of humanism.
Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.
I met my husband Itzik when I got back home to Israel from Oxford in 2002. He is my Internet-of-all-Things.
The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do.
Until about 30,000 years ago, there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia, and so forth.
Those who refuse to liberalise and globalise are doomed to failure.
Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you’re just unable to focus.
My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what’s really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what’s happening in the world.
