Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings, which causes us to be in a constant state of tension, restlessness and dissatisfaction.

la misma manera que una compañía sin dinero está en bancarrota. Si una especie puede alardear de muchas copias de ADN, es un éxito, y la especie prospera. Desde esta perspectiva, 1.000 copias siempre son mejores que 100 copias. Esta es la esencia de la revolución agrícola: la capacidad de mantener más gente viva en peores condiciones.

Science and the Industrial Revolution have given humankind superhuman powers and practically limitless energy. The social order has been completely transformed, as have politics, daily life and human psychology. But are we happier? Did the wealth humankind accumulated over the last five centuries translate into a new-found contentment? Did the discovery of inexhaustible energy resources open before us inexhaustible stores of bliss?

Every decade archaeologists discover another few forgotten scripts. Some of them might prove to be even older than the Sumerian scratches in clay. But most of them remain curiosities because those who invented them failed to invent efficient ways of cataloguing and retrieving data. What set apart Sumer, as well as pharaonic Egypt, ancient China and the Inca Empire, is that these cultures developed good techniques of archiving, cataloguing and retrieving written records.

In] the twenty-first century, you can hardly afford stability. If you try to hold on to some stable identity, job or world view, you risk being left behind as the world flies by you with a whooooosh. Given that life expectancy is likely to increase, you might subsequently have to spend many decades as a clueless fossil. To stay relevant - not just economically, but above all socially - you will need the ability to constantly learn and to reinvent yourself, certainly at a young age like fifty.

there is always a danger that the engineers will somehow program their own subconscious biases into the software.21 Yet once we discover such mistakes, it would probably be far easier to debug the software than to rid humans of their racist and misogynist biases.

happiness consists in seeing one's life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile. There is an important cognitive and ethical component

Two lawyers who have never met can nevertheless combine efforts to defend a complete stranger because they both believe in the existence of laws, justice, human rights – and the money paid out in fees.

If some politicians don't understand these questions, or if they constantly talk about the past without being able to formulate a meaningful vision for the future, don't vote for them.

Rather, feelings are biochemical mechanisms that all mammals and birds use in order to quickly calculate probabilities of survival and reproduction. Feelings aren't based on intuition, inspiration or freedom they are based on calculation. (page 36)

Yet the real meaning of the word human is 'an animal belonging to the genus Homo', and there used to be many other species of this genus besides Homo sapiens.

here is that line from the American Declaration of Independence translated into biological terms: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

It's common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that earth's climate never rests. It is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change. In particular, our planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming. During the last million years, there has been an ice age on average every 100,000 years. The last one ran from about 75,000 to 15,000 years ago.

Its principal tenet is that economic growth is the supreme good, or at least a proxy for the supreme good, because justice, freedom and even happiness all depend on economic growth.

Humans have two basic types of abilities: physical and cognitive. As long as machines competed with us humans merely in physical abilities, there were countless cognitive tasks that humans performed better.

Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not exist. Time too did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed 'before' the Big Bang.

El invento del politeísmo es favorable a una tolerancia religiosa de mucho alcance. Puesto que los politeístas creen, por un lado, en un poder supremo y completamente desinteresado, y por otro, en muchos poderes parciales y sesgados, no hay dificultad para que los devotos de un dios acepten la existencia y eficacia de otros dioses. El politeísmo es intrínsecamente liberal, y raramente persigue a «herejes» o «infieles».

Sociological research has shown that the maximum 'natural' size of a group bonded by a gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know, nor gossip effectively about, more than 150 human beings. ... But once the threshold of 150 individuals is crossed, things can go longer work that way.

to eat and drink in moderation, and to curb one's sexual appetites. In the long run, a deep friendship will make us more content than a frenzied orgy.

Thirdly, mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia – whenever people settled another part of the Outer World.

Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world.

Anyone who has read a novel by Charles Dickens knows that the liberal regimes of nineteenth-century Europe gave priority to individual freedom even if it meant throwing insolvent poor families in prison and giving orphans little choice but to join schools for pickpockets. Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of daily life.

If happiness is determined by expectations, then two pillars of our society – mass media and the advertising industry – may unwittingly be depleting the globe's reservoirs of contentment

Never in history did a government know so much about what's going on in the world – yet few empires have botched things up as clumsily as the contemporary United States. It's like a poker player who knows what cards his opponents hold, yet somehow still manages to lose round after round.