913 Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

Women are generally more resistant to hunger, disease and fatigue than men.

The technological revolution might soon push billions of humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class,” leading to social and political upheavals that no existing ideology knows how to handle.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.

As the twenty-first century unfolds, nationalism is fast losing ground. More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics.

Famine, plague and war will probably continue to claim millions of victims in the coming decades. Yet they are no longer unavoidable tragedies beyond the understanding and control of a helpless humanity.

By the early 1990s, thinkers and politicians alike hailed “the End of History,” confidently asserting that all the big political and economic questions of the past had been settled and that the refurbished liberal package of democracy, human rights, free markets, and government welfare services remained the only game in town.

Secular ethics relies not on obeying the edicts of this or that god, but rather on a deep appreciation of suffering.

Modern-day science is a unique tradition of knowledge, inasmuch as it openly admits collective ignorance regarding the most important questions.

The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction scientists are taking. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real questions facing us is not ‘What do we want to become?‘, but “What do we want to want?’ Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.