The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world (i.e. those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals.” (Homo Deus Quotes)
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs or national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements among people who already agree on the basics.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Every day millions of people decide to grant their Smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Fiction isn’t bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society can function. We can’t play football unless everyone believes in the same made-up rules, and we can’t enjoy the benefits of markets and courts without similar make-believe stories. But stories are just tools. They shouldn’t become our goals or our yardsticks. When we forget that they are mere fiction, we lose touch with reality. Then we begin entire wars `to make a lot of money for the cooperation’ or ‘to protect the national interest’. Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our life in their service.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“For religions, spirituality is a dangerous threat.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others. Human”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo sapiens is the only species on earth capable of cooperating flexibly in large numbers. Intelligence and toolmaking were obviously very important as well. But if humans had not learned to cooperate flexibly in large numbers, our crafty brains and deft hands would still be splitting flint stones rather than uranium atoms.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“If I identify happiness with fleeting pleasant sensations, and crave to experience more and more of them, I have no choice but to pursue them constantly.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“If Marx came back to life today, he would probably urge his few remaining disciples to devote less time to reading Das Kapital and more time to studying the Internet and the human genome.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“If pupils suffer from attention disorders, stress and low grades, perhaps we ought to blame outdated teaching methods, overcrowded classrooms and an unnaturally fast tempo of life.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
“In the heyday of European imperialism, conquistadors and merchants bought entire islands and countries in exchange for coloured beads. In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the 21st century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. People just don’t know what to pay attention to, and they often spend their time investigating and debating side issues.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos. From”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Mathematics leads you to a very scary conclusion: since there is only one real world, whereas the number of potential virtual worlds is infinite, the probability that you happen to inhabit the sole real world is almost zero.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Meaning and authority always go hand in hand. Whoever determines the meaning of our actions – whether they are good or evil, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly – also gains the authority to tell us what to think and how to behave.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning; modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
Homo Deus Quotes“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
Homo Deus
“No clear line separates healing from upgrading. Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“No investigation of our divine future can ignore our own animal past, or our relations with other animals – because the relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for future relations between superhumans and humans.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“One of the wonderful things about science is that when scientists don’t know something, they can try out all kinds of theories and conjunctures, but in the end they can just admit their ignorance.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Our narrating self would much prefer to continue suffering in the future, just so it won’t have to admit that our past suffering was devoid of all meaning. Eventually, if we want to come clean about past mistakes, our narrating self must invent some twist in the plot that will infuse these mistakes with meaning.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
“People who believe in the hi-tech Ark should not be put in charge of the global ecology, for the same reason that people who believe in a heavenly afterlife should not be given nuclear weapons.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Previous generations thought about peace as the temporary absence of war. Today we think about peace as the implausibility of war.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
“Religion is a deal, whereas spirituality is a journey”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Sapiens don’t behave according to a cold mathematical logic, but rather according to a warm social logic. We are ruled by emotions.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Sapiens rule the world because only they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a web of laws, forces, entities and places that exist purely in their common imagination. This web allows humans alone to organise crusades, socialist revolutions and human rights movements.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“The algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions and thoughts.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“The better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“The cold hand of the past emerges from the grave of our ancestors, grips us by the neck and directs our gaze towards a single future.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“This is all the fault of evolution. For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
“This is the paradox of historical knowledge. Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“To attain real happiness, humans need to slow down the pursuit of pleasant sensations, not accelerate it.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives, and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. Many if not most humans may be unable to do so.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
“We are suddenly showing unprecedented interest in the fate of so-called lower life forms, perhaps because we are about to become one.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“We aren’t born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life, we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately and others show compassion to us. if we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
“What some people hope to get by studying, working or raising a family, others try to obtain far more easily through the right dosage of molecules. This is an existential threat to the social and economic order, which is why countries wage a stubborn, bloody and hopeless war on biochemical crime.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
“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
Homo Deus
“Yet in truth the lives of most people have meaning only within the network of stories they tell one another.”
Yuval Noah Harari
Homo Deus
