913 Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning; modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.

However, just as the gap between religion and science is narrower than we commonly think, so the gap between religion and spirituality is much wider. Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey.

Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics.

By 2050, not only the idea of a job for life but even that of a profession for life might seem antediluvian.

I encourage all of us, whatever our beliefs, to question the basic narratives of our world, to connect past developments with present concerns, and not to be afraid of controversial issues.

Hence paradoxically, as we accumulate more data and increase our computing power, events become wilder and more unexpected.

We need a new global identity because national institutions are incapable of handling a set of unprecedented global predicaments. We now have a global ecology, a global economy, and a global science – but we are still stuck with only national politics.

Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.

Which means that when designing their self-driving car, Toyota or Tesla will be transforming a theoretical problem in the philosophy of ethics into a practical problem of engineering.