Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

In the late 20th century democracies usually outperformed dictatorships because of democracies were better at data processing. A democracy diffuses the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas a dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place.

essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

People tended to reconcile themselves to the status quo, declaring that 'this is how it always was, and this is how it always will be'.

Property is a prerequisite for long-term inequality.

Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans.

Then the algorithm will know best, the algorithm will always be right, and beauty will be in the calculations of the algorithm.

Todos los relatos que nos dan sentido e identidad son ficticios,

Nobody in twelfth-century England knew what human rights were. You want to travel to the Middle East and risk your life not in order to kill Muslims, but to protect one group of Muslims from another? You must be out of your mind.

When kings fail to do their jobs and regulate the markets properly, it leads to loss of trust, dwindling credit and economic depression. That was the lesson taught by the Mississippi Bubble of 1719, and anyone who forgot it was reminded by the US housing bubble of 2007, and the ensuing credit crunch and recession.

green monkey, for example, has been observed calling 'Careful! A lion!' when there was no lion around. This alarm conveniently frightened away a fellow monkey who had just found a banana, leaving the liar all alone to steal the prize for itself.

Coca-Cola, Amazon, Baidu, and the government are all racing to hack you. Not your smartphone, not your computer, and not your bank account; they are in a race to hack you and your organic operating system. You might have heard that we are living in the era of hacking computers, but that's not even half the truth. In fact, we are living in the era of hacking humans.

a human being needs just 1,500–2,500 calories per day in order to survive. Anything more is a luxury.

However, fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively.

El capital se va paulatinamente de los estados dictatoriales que no defienden a los individuos privados y su propiedad. En cambio, afluye a los estados que hacen cumplir la norma de la ley y de la propiedad privada.

Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.

Clennon King, a black student who applied to the University of Mississippi in 1958, was forcefully committed to a mental asylum. The presiding judge ruled that a black person must surely be insane to think that he could be admitted to the University of Mississippi. The vicious circle: a chance historical situation is translated into a rigid social system.

A natural order is a stable order. There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them. In order to safeguard an imagined order, continuous and strenuous efforts are imperative. Some of these efforts take the shape of violence and coercion.

El arte desempeña un papel clave en dar forma a la visión que la gente tiene del mundo,

Homo sapiens, the brain accounts for about 2–3 per cent of total body weight, but it consumes 25 per cent of the body's energy when the body is at rest. By comparison, the brains of other apes require only 8 per cent of rest-time energy.

pero los humanos necesitamos creer en ellos. Así, ¿cómo hacer que el relato se perciba como real? Es evidente por qué los humanos quieren creer en él, pero ¿cómo se lo creen realmente? Ya hace miles de años que sacerdotes y chamanes dieron con la respuesta: mediante rituales. Un ritual es un acto mágico que hace que lo abstracto sea concreto y lo ficticio,

Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable') and Leviticus 20:13 ('If a man has sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They are to be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads').

This escape clause has been the salvation of modern society, for it is impossible to sustain order without meaning. The great political, artistic and religious project of modernity has been to find a meaning to life that is not rooted in some great cosmic plan. We are not actors in a divine drama, and nobody cares about us and our deeds, so nobody sets limits to our power – but we are still convinced our lives have meaning.

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly.