913 Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

The world is becoming ever more complex, and people fail to realize just how ignorant they are of what’s going on.

For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined.

Some religions, such as Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.

When a thousand people believe some made-up story for a month – that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years – that’s religion, and we are admonished to call it fake news in oder not to for the feelings of the faithful.

A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.

Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.

Modernity is a surprisingly simple deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.

The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith.

Consider a resident of Berlin, born in 1900 and living to the ripe age of one hundred. She spent her childhood in the Hohenzollern Empire of William II; her adult years in the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Third Reich and Communist East Germany; and she died a citizen of a democratic and reunified Germany. She had managed to be a part of five very different sociopolitical systems, though her DNA remained exactly the same.