Yuval Noah Harari Quotes

Yuval Noah Harari

Profession : Historian

Birth : February 24, 1976

There is no limit to how much health you can provide people.

Yuval Noah Harari

You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology.

Yuval Noah Harari

What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?

Yuval Noah Harari

Fundamentally, mankind was unimportant in the ecological system. Then, in one fell swoop, an evolutionary blink of an eye, the human race is transformed from something unimportant to the most important thing in the world.

Yuval Noah Harari

If we are allowed to do experiments on monkeys because we are superior to them in a certain way, then someone who is superior to me is allowed to do experiments on me.

Yuval Noah Harari

When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last.

Yuval Noah Harari

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.

Yuval Noah Harari

Those who refuse to liberalise and globalise are doomed to failure.

Yuval Noah Harari

In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia.

Yuval Noah Harari

I'm not a very glamorous person. I like to just sit alone in a room and read a book or meditate.

Yuval Noah Harari

The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that.

Yuval Noah Harari

The old 20th-century political model of Left vs. Right is now basically irrelevant, and the real divide today is between global and national, global or local. All over the world, this is not the main struggle.

Yuval Noah Harari

For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person.

Yuval Noah Harari

Buddhism maintains that the common reaction of the human mind to pleasure and to achievement is not satisfaction; it's craving for more.

Yuval Noah Harari

Science is telling us that the reason people die is not because some god said so or because the laws of nature mandate it. People always die because of technical problems. And every technical problem has, in principle, a technical solution.

Yuval Noah Harari