100+ Yuval Noah Harari Quotes About the World Today
Slim and soft-spoken, endearingly warm and witty, with an enviable knack for captivating the interest of his audiences during his lectures and speeches, Israeli historian and philosopher, Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, addresses a number of important issues on the global agenda and provides a critical examination of the shape of things to come. Here are more than a hundred Yuval Noah Harari quotes on a philosopher’s view of the world as it is today.
A public intellectual and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Dr. Harari is the best-selling author of “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”, “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”.
Born in 1976, in Kirya Ata, Israel, Dr. Harari studied history and international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and in Oxford. He has garnered numerous awards and accolades for his work and is regarded as one of the world’s most prominent intellectuals.
His narrative explores human history from the evolution of Homo Sapiens to apex predator and the eventual rise to Homo Deus, and examines how AI, genetic engineering and god like technologies will shape tomorrow’s world. Captivating and profound, his account predicts a maybe unsettling story about the future of mankind. His unconventional views have challenged the thinking of millions of people, inspiring them to dig deeper, but have also attracted criticism and contempt for being an oversimplified, populist narrative, full of inconsistencies. Notwithstanding its flaws, some critics agree that certain of Dr. Harari’s observations and arguments are worth examining.
In a world where uncertainty has become a feature, it is important to seek out the things that are of eternal value, so here we have curated for you Dr. Harari’s most inspirational quotes to keep you grounded in the things that matter. Share them with loved ones and friends in order to motivate them! Reflect upon them to gain insight and transform your perspective of the world!
Table of Contents
- Short and Powerful Yuval Noah Harari Quotes
- Yuval Noah Harari Quotes About AI
- Yuval Noah Harari Quotes About How Stories Define Human Behavior
- Yuval Noah Harari Quotes About Life
- Yuval Noah Harari’s Quotes About Human History
- Yuval Noah Harari’s Quotes About Society
- Yuval Noah Harari’s Quotes About Religion
- Funny Quotes By Yuval Noah Harari
Short and Powerful Yuval Noah Harari Quotes
Short but powerful quotes by Yuval Noah Harari, that encapsulate in one sentence the essence of his ideas, providing a new perspective for understanding the world in a different light.
- In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. Yuval Noah Harari
- The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains. Yuval Noah Harari
- There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination. Yuval Noah Harari
- It takes a tribe to raise a human. Yuval Noah Harari
- Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. Yuval Noah Harari
- If you cannot afford to waste time, you will never find the truth. Yuval Noah Harari
- The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Yuval Noah Harari
- Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question. Yuval Noah Harari
- Silence isn’t neutrality; it is supporting the status-quo. Yuval Noah Harari
- Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer. Yuval Noah Harari
- The first thing you need to know about yourself is that you are not a story. Yuval Noah Harari
- To run fast, don’t take much baggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy. Yuval Noah Harari
- One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Yuval Noah Harari
- Consistency is the playground of dull minds. Yuval Noah Harari
- Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. Yuval Noah Harari
- Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. Yuval Noah Harari
- The governmental tortoise cannot keep up with the technological hare. Yuval Noah Harari
- Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. Yuval Noah Harari
- Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Yuval Noah Harari
- To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it. Yuval Noah Harari
- First, if you want reliable information, pay good money for it. If you get your news for free, you might well be the product. Yuval Noah Harari
- The more we know, the less we can predict. Yuval Noah Harari
- Unlike the everlasting soul, the mind has many parts, it constantly changes, and there is no reason to think it is eternal. Yuval Noah Harari
- Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question. Yuval Noah Harari
- Humans were always far better at inventing tools than using them wisely. Yuval Noah Harari
- Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. Yuval Noah Harari
- Does happiness really depend on self-delusion? Yuval Noah Harari
- Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. Yuval Noah Harari
- Identity is defined by conflicts and dilemmas more than by agreement. Yuval Noah Harari
- The real test of ‘knowledge’ is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Yuval Noah Harari
- Nothing is inherently beautiful, sacred, or sexy; human feelings make it so. Yuval Noah Harari
- One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world and think in absolute terms. Yuval Noah Harari
- Gender is a race in which some of the runners compete only for the bronze medal. Yuval Noah Harari
- The algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions and thoughts. Yuval Noah Harari
- Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want? Yuval Noah Harari
- Today the main source of wealth is knowledge. And whereas you can conquer oil fields through war, you cannot acquire knowledge that way. Yuval Noah Harari
- Our DNA still thinks we are in the savannah. Yuval Noah Harari
- We are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Yuval Noah Harari
- For real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war. There has never been real peace in the world. Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari Quotes About AI
Technology and AI are rapidly changing the world we live in, and if left unregulated, will turn into a tool of tyranny. The new singularity will hack humanity and transform us into a new species.
- Artificial intelligence is now poised to surpass human intelligence. Yuval Noah Harari
- Our decisions aren’t really our decisions as we increasingly depend on AI. Yuval Noah Harari
- At present we trust Netflix to recommend movies and Google Maps to choose whether to turn right or left. But once we begin to count on AI to decide what to study, where to work and who to marry, human life will cease to be a drama of decision-making. Yuval Noah Harari
- We trust the algorithm more than any other humans around us. Yuval Noah Harari
- Ordinary people may not understand artificial intelligence and biotechnology, but they can sense that the future is passing them by. Yuval Noah Harari
- When people design web pages, they often cater to the taste of the Google search algorithm rather than to the taste of any human being. Yuval Noah Harari
- Have you seen those zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them? Yuval Noah Harari
- Many people are happy to follow the advice of their smartphones or to take whatever drug the doctor prescribes, but when they hear of upgraded superhumans, they say: ‘I hope, I will be dead before that happens. Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari Quotes About How Stories Define Human Behavior
Humans construct myths and stories because we want an answer about everything in life. Stories can provide an identity and purpose and give meaning to existence, but they also shape our behavior.
- Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myth. Yuval Noah Harari
- Humans think in stories rather than in facts, numbers, or equations, and the simpler the story, the better. Yuval Noah Harari
- Earlier traditions usually formulated their theories in terms of stories. Modern science uses mathematics. Yuval Noah Harari
- How do you live in an age of bewilderment, when the old stories have collapsed and no new story has yet emerged to replace them? Yuval Noah Harari
- Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Yuval Noah Harari
- Cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them. Yuval Noah Harari
- You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven. Yuval Noah Harari
- Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Yuval Noah Harari
- How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. Yuval Noah Harari
- Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers. That’s why Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos and research laboratories. Yuval Noah Harari
- Unlike the laws of physics, which are free of inconsistencies, every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this process fuels change. Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari Quotes About Life
A mélange of quotes about life and its meaning. Dr. Harari adopts a rather reductionist view of life, almost bordering to the nihilistic. He argues that life is in essence meaningless, being simply a function of biochemical reactions.
- If you are really in love with someone, you never worry about the meaning of life. Yuval Noah Harari
- The real enigma of life is not what happens after you die but what happens before you die. Yuval Noah Harari
- The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more. Yuval Noah Harari
- In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. Yuval Noah Harari
- When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison. Yuval Noah Harari
- As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is. Yuval Noah Harari
- Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. Yuval Noah Harari
- We do not become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon. Yuval Noah Harari
- Money, social status, plastic surgery, beautiful houses, powerful positions – none of these will bring you happiness. Lasting happiness comes only from serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. Yuval Noah Harari
- Suffering arises from craving; the only way to be fully liberated from suffering is to be fully liberated from craving; and the only way to be liberated from craving is to train the mind to experience reality as it is. Yuval Noah Harari
- Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari’s Quotes About Human History
A collection of Dr. Harari’s best quotes about the history of mankind. Understanding human history widens our perspective of available possibilities.
- History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. Yuval Noah Harari
- We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. Yuval Noah Harari
- Unfortunately, history does not give discounts. Yuval Noah Harari
- This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Yuval Noah Harari
- People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes. Yuval Noah Harari
- This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none. Yuval Noah Harari
- The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. Yuval Noah Harari
- The better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated. Yuval Noah Harari
- The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history. Yuval Noah Harari
- The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish. Yuval Noah Harari
- If humankind is indeed a single data-processing system, what is its output? Dataists would say that its output will be the creation of a new and even more efficient data-processing system, called the Internet-of-All-Things. Once this mission is accomplished, Homo sapiens will vanish. Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari’s Quotes About Society
Dr. Harari argues that the main drive behind human society has been our creative cooperation and our innate capacity to believe in fictions and myths.
- Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. Yuval Noah Harari
- Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Yuval Noah Harari
- In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products but above all to reinvent yourself again and again. Yuval Noah Harari
- Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted. Yuval Noah Harari
- 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. Yuval Noah Harari
- In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder. Yuval Noah Harari
- Modern culture is the most powerful in history, and it is ceaselessly researching, inventing, discovering and growing. At the same time, it is plagued by more existential angst than any previous culture. Yuval Noah Harari
- Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’. Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari’s Quotes About Religion
According to Dr. Harari, religions are a human construct based on shared sets of values and ideologies. They are organizational tools that give rise to ethics and laws.
- Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey. Yuval Noah Harari
- The first principle of monotheist religions is ‘God exists. What does He want from me?’ The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it? Yuval Noah Harari
- Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry. This is an unjust stereotype. Yuval Noah Harari
- Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion. Yuval Noah Harari
- Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Yuval Noah Harari
- For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat. Yuval Noah Harari
- Religion cannot be equated with superstition, because most people are unlikely to call their cherished beliefs ‘superstitions’. We always believe in ‘the truth’. It’s only other people who believe in superstitions. Yuval Noah Harari
- More than a century after Nietzsche pronounced Him dead, God seems to be making a comeback. But this is a mirage. God is dead – it’s just taking a while to get rid of the body. Yuval Noah Harari
- Whereas the Agricultural Revolution gave rise to theist religions, the Scientific Revolution gave birth to humanist religions, in which humans replaced gods. Yuval Noah Harari
- Religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and it is defined by its social function rather than by the existence of deities. Religion is anything that confers superhuman legitimacy on human social structures. It legitimizes human norms and values by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws. Yuval Noah Harari
Funny Quotes By Yuval Noah Harari
A list of Dr. Harari’s most witty and humorous quotes to lighten you up by providing an amusing perspective to the funny side of things.
- We should never underestimate human stupidity. Both on the personal and on the collective level, humans are prone to engage in self-destructive activities. Yuval Noah Harari
- Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less patient, and investors are the least patient of all. Yuval Noah Harari
- Modern business-people and lawyers are, in fact, powerful sorcerers. The principal difference between them and tribal shamans is that modern lawyers tell far stranger tales. Yuval Noah Harari
- The deeper the mysteries of the universe, the less likely it is that whatever is responsible for them gives a damn about female dress codes or human sexual behavior. Yuval Noah Harari
Is Yuval Noah Harari a visionary historian or a prophet of doom, with a grand meta narrative about a dystopian future society? No matter what one may believe, what is important is that Dr. Harari is offering a crisp and stimulating provocation to challenge our thinking and beliefs.
In our turbulent times, where the old story is collapsing and a new one is about to replace it, what we believe shapes the society we create and it is our perspective that will open new vistas to a brave new world.
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