Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

New technologies kill old gods and give birth to new gods.

Wheat and goats were domesticated by approximately 9000 BC; peas and lentils around 8000 BC; olive trees by 5000 BC; horses by 4000 BC; and grapevines in 3500 BC.

Mucho antes de la revolución industrial, Homo sapiens ostentaba el récord entre todos los organismos por provocar la extinción del mayor número de especies de plantas y animales.

Los antiguos romanos estaban acostumbrados a ser derrotados. Al igual que los mandatarios de la mayor parte de los grandes imperios de la historia, podían perder batalla tras batalla pero aun así ganar la guerra.

Estudiamos historia no para conocer el futuro, sino para ampliar nuestros horizontes, para comprender que nuestra situación actual no es natural ni inevitable y que, en consecuencia, tenemos ante nosotros muchas más posibilidades de las que imaginamos.

in the past people had to exert great effort and undergo years of hard moral training in order to overcome their anger, their hatred, and their dangerous passions. But now, if your anger or passion threatens to overwhelm you, all you need to do is swallow a few pills. "Anybody can be virtuous now," concludes Mustapha. "You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle.

Humans were always far better in inventing tools than using them wisely.

In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that 'God is a product of the human imagination'. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: 'Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is just the product of biochemical algorithms.

Como você faz as pessoas acreditarem em uma ordem imaginada como o cristianismo, a democracia ou o capitalismo? Primeiro, você nunca admite que a ordem é imaginada. Você sempre insiste que a ordem que sustenta a sociedade é uma realidade objetiva criada pelos grandes deuses ou pelas leis da natureza.

Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.

the last 100,000 years – with the rise of Homo sapiens – that man jumped to the top of the food chain.

Humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously. And among all forms of humility, perhaps the most important is to have humility before

Since long intestines and large brains are both massive energy consumers, it's hard to have both. By shortening the intestines and decreasing their energy consumption, cooking inadvertently opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having

Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life.

We don't need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.

Zaman alabilir ama nihayetinde Kuzey Kore, Irak ve El Salvador da Danimarka'ya ya da Iowa'ya benzeyecek.

La Iglesia católica ha sobrevivido durante siglos, no por transmitir un «gen del celibato» de un Papa al siguiente, sino por transmitir los relatos del Nuevo Testamento y de la Ley canónica católica.

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.

Similarly, if in 2070 you tell the lower classes that they enjoy better healthcare than in 2017, it might be very cold comfort to them, because they would be comparing themselves to the upgraded superhumans who dominate the world.

Ruthless billionaires and small interest groups flourish in today's chaotic world not because they read the map better than anyone else, but because they have very narrow aims.

In reply to Roman peace offers, the chieftain Calgacus called the Romans 'the ruffians of the world', and said that 'to plunder, slaughter and robbery they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace'.2

The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory.

Secondly, when climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are usually hit as hard as land dwellers. Yet there is no evidence of any significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago.