913 Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

When I was twenty-one, I finally realized that I was gay, after several years of living in denial. That’s hardly exceptional. Many gay men spend their entire teenage years unsure about their sexuality.

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.

Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy. Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another. These principles have no objective validity.

But humans do such things all the time. Because the Sapiens social order is imagined, humans cannot preserve the critical information for running it simply by making copies of their DNA and passing these on to their progeny. A conscious effort has to be made to sustain laws, customs, procedures and manners, otherwise the social order would quickly collapse.

The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

Terrorism is the weapon of a marginal and weak segment of humanity. How did it come to dominate global politics?