Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust.

There is just no such thing as "Christian economics," "Muslim economics," or "Hindu economics.

Las materias primas y la energía pueden agotarse: cuanto más las usamos, menos tenemos. El conocimiento, en cambio, es un recurso en aumento: cuanto más lo usamos, más tenemos.

Paradise, the capitalists promise, is right around the corner. True, mistakes have been made such as the Atlantic slave trade and the exploitation of the European working class, but we have learned our lesson and if we just wait a little longer and allow the pie to grow a little bigger, everybody will receive a fatter slice.

In the end he came to the realization that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one's own mind

Humans have two types of abilities – physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning, analysing, communicating and above all understanding human emotions.

You can do many things with bayonets, but it is rather uncomfortable to sit on them.' A

Since all social orders and hierarchies are imagined, they are all fragile, and the larger the society, the more fragile it is.

being satisfied with what you already have is far more important than getting more of what you want.

Even more alarmingly, the richest one hundred people together own more than the poorest four billion.

To grasp the depth and implications of the humanist revolution, consider how modern European culture differs from medieval European culture. In 1300 people in London, Paris and Toledo did not believe that humans could determine by themselves what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, what is beautiful and what is ugly. Only God could create and define goodness, righteousness and beauty. Although

Indeed, in most countries today overeating has become a far worse problem than famine. In the eighteenth century Marie Antoinette allegedly advised the starving masses that if they ran out of bread, they should just eat cake instead. Today, the poor are following this advice to the letter. Whereas the rich residents of Beverly Hills eat lettuce salad and steamed tofu with quinoa, in the slums and ghettos the poor gorge on Twinkie cakes, Cheetos, hamburgers and pizza

What happened in the Cognitive Revolution?

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

ecological collapse.

nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.

Even Russia nowadays pretends to be a democracy. Victory

but their offspring, called mules, are sterile.

relationship between humans and a small group of ethereal

At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over 100 pounds. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.

The best-known religions of history, such as Islam and Buddhism, are universal and missionary. Consequently

What is the difference between describing 'how' and explaining 'why'? To describe 'how' means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain 'why' means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.

The monotheist religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.

sistema de procesamiento de datos que los sumerios inventaron se llama «escritura».