913 Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

Technology has changed everything by creating a set of global existential threats that no nation can solve on its own.

Radical Islam poses no serious threat to the liberal package, because for all their fervour the zealots don’t really understand the world of the twenty-first century, and have nothing relevant to say about the novel dangers and opportunities that new technologies are generating all around us.

Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations.

In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands, humankind will split into different species.

The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. When the peasant brother made his way to the Beijing market with his torn clothes, rough manners and incomprehensible dialect, he would quickly have discovered that in the business world, manners and connections often speak far louder than genes.

Terrorism works by pressing the fear button deep in our minds and hijacking the private imagination of millions of individuals.

Today, the richest 1 percent own half the world’s wealth. Even more alarmingly, the richest one hundred people together own more than the poorest four billion.

There is little sense, then, in arguing that the natural function of women is to give birth, or that homosexuality is unnatural. Most of the laws, norms, rights and obligations that define manhood and womanhood reflect human imagination more than biological reality.