Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

The most common answer is that our language is amazingly supple.

Russia has been following the schoolyard-bully principle: pick on the weakest kid, and don't beat him up too much, lest the teacher intervene.

In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection.

The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people.

In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year. It would therefore be madness to block automation in fields such as transport and healthcare just in order to protect human jobs. After all, what we ultimately ought to protect is humans—not jobs. Displaced drivers and doctors will just have to find something else to do.

Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals Ability to Hack Humans.

all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities.

The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings. When the peasant brother made his way to the Beijing market with his torn clothes, rough manners and incomprehensible dialect, he would quickly have discovered that in the business world, manners and connections often speak far louder than genes.

It is often said that God helps those who help themselves. This is a roundabout way of saying that God doesn't exist, but if our belief in Him inspires us to do something ourselves – it helps.

Religions, rites, and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions.

Similar probabilistic models have become central to economics, sociology, psychology, political science and the other social and natural sciences.

Shepherds and farmers throughout history showed affection for their animals and have taken great care of them, just as many slaveholders felt affection and concern for their slaves.

The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain and became the deadliest species ever in the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.

People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they are already trapped inside a box—their brain—which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions.

b × c × d = ahh! Biological knowledge multiplied by Computing power multiplied by Data equals Ability to Hack Humans.

But at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this is no longer true: Homo sapiens is transcending those limits. It is now beginning to break the laws of natural selection, replacing them with the laws of intelligent design.

What do you do when nobody needs your cheap unskilled laborers and you don't have the resources to build a good education system and teach them new skills?

When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix.

Large animals – the primary victims of the Australian extinction – breed slowly. Pregnancy is long, offspring per pregnancy are few, and there are long breaks between pregnancies. Consequently, if humans cut down even one diprotodon every few months, it would be enough to cause diprotodon deaths to outnumber births. Within a few thousand years the last, lonesome diprotodon would pass away, and with her the entire species.4

When everybody uses the same oracle, and everybody believes the oracle, the oracle turns into a sovereign.

If AI and 3-D printers indeed take over from the Bangladeshis and Bangalorians, the revenues that previously flowed to South Asia will now fill the coffers of a few tech giants in California. Instead of economic growth improving conditions all over the world, we might see immense new wealth created in high-tech hubs such as Silicon Valley, while many developing countries collapse.

Yet once biologists concluded that organisms are algorithms, they dismantled the wall between the organic and the inorganic, turned the computer revolution from a purely mechanical affair into a biological cataclysm, and shifted authority from individual humans to networked algorithms.

Not all people get the same chance to cultivate and refine their abilities. Whether or not they have such an opportunity will usually depend on their place within their society's imagined hierachy. Harry Potter is a good example. Removed from his disinguished wizard family and brought up by ignorant muggles, he arrives at Hogwarts without any experience in magic. It takes him seven books to gain a firm command of his powers and knowledge of his unique abilities.