Yuval Noah Harari quotes
Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
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.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
I don't like the word 'abstractions' very much because most people don't think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
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.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
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.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
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.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
You have to know how to co-operate with other people if you want to stay alive and raise children. And to do that, you need to know something about them. You need to know who loves whom, who hates whom, who is sleeping with whom. Who is honest, who is a cheat.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
Our bodies and minds evolved and were adapted for hundreds of thousands of years for tasks like climbing a tree and picking apples, or hunting rabbits, or looking for mushrooms in the forest. They were not adapted to the very gruelling work that is involved in field work - ploughing, harvesting, bringing water, digging weeds - things like that.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions - what's the meaning of life, what are we doing here - then somewhere in their 20s, they seem to say, 'I'll just get married. I'll just have kids. I'll get back to that later.' But they never do. For me, it kept boiling.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
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.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
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.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
If you think about the great religions that have united large parts of humankind, people believe gods are very concrete - there is an angry old man in the sky, and if I do something wrong, he will punish me.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
The key to victory lies more in manipulation and cooperation than in exceptional personal skills.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people.
Yuval Noah Harari quotes
The most important question in 21st-century economics may well be, 'What should we do with all the superfluous people, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than humans?'