Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari was born on 24 February 1976 in Kiryat Ata, in Israel. A citizen of Israel, he has worked across several overlapping roles throughout his career — as a historian, a medievalist, a military historian, a philosopher, a university teacher, and a popular science author.
Harari was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Jesus College. That training led him to a professorship in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the same institution where his own studies began. He works in Hebrew and English, and has also used Russian.
His books address large stretches of time and a wide range of subjects. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind appeared in 2011, followed by Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow in 2016. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century was published in 2018, and Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI followed in 2024. Across these titles he has written both as a popular science author and as a philosopher engaging with questions that extend well beyond any single academic discipline.
Recognition of his work has come from beyond Israel. The Vrije Universiteit Brussel awarded him an honorary doctorate, acknowledging the reach of his writing outside his home country. Harari holds his professorship in history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the institution with which his academic career has remained closely tied.
Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari's insights on:
In Judaism or Christianity and so forth, you invent rules that don't exist anywhere except in your imagination. You spend your life trying to gain points and to avoid all kinds of things that detract from your points. And if by the time you die you gather enough points, then you pass on to the next level, in Heaven.
Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data.
You go to a Japanese restaurant and have a wonderful dish, and the thing to do is take a picture with your phone, put it on Facebook, and see how many likes you get. If you don't share your experiences, they don't become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning.
Until about 30,000 years ago, there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia, and so forth.
I don't like the word 'abstractions' very much because most people don't think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete.
If you think about the great religions that have united large parts of humankind, people believe gods are very concrete - there is an angry old man in the sky, and if I do something wrong, he will punish me.
People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future.