Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

I met my husband Itzik when I got back home to Israel from Oxford in 2002. He is my Internet-of-all-Things.

As a historian, I'm sceptical about conspiracy theories because the world is far too complicated to be managed by a few billionaires drinking scotch behind some closed doors. But I do think that the voters are correct in sensing that they're really losing power. And in reaction, they give the system an angry kick.

Humans have an amazing capacity to believe in contradictory things. For example, to believe in an omnipotent and benevolent God but somehow excuse Him from all the suffering in the world. Or our ability to believe from the standpoint of law that humans are equal and have free will and from biology that humans are just organic machines.

For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad.

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.

I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people.

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.

We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with human rights, and we do the same thing with money.

As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners.

Our bodies and minds evolved and were adapted for hundreds of thousands of years for tasks like climbing a tree and picking apples, or hunting rabbits, or looking for mushrooms in the forest. They were not adapted to the very gruelling work that is involved in field work - ploughing, harvesting, bringing water, digging weeds - things like that.

Humans are extremely good in acquiring new power, but they are not very good in translating this power into greater happiness, which is why we are far more powerful than ever before but we don't seem to be much happier.

Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it.

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

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.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

Biology enables, Culture forbids.

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

The romantic contrast between modern industry that "destroys nature" and our ancestors who "lived in harmony with nature" is groundless. 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 life.

Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.

So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.

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.

happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.