Quotes from Yuval Noah Harari

What's the point of making predictions if they can not change anything?

If, in British-ruled India, an Untouchable, a Brahmin, a Catholic Irishman and a Protestant Englishman had somehow developed exactly the same business acumen, they still would not have had the same chance of becoming rich. The economic game was rigged by legal restrictions and unofficial glass ceilings.

Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalisation and bureaucracy.

The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly. France and the United States quickly followed in Britain's footsteps because the French and Americans already shared the most important British myths and social structures.

Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, 'us vs them', and to foresee the potential unity of humankind. For

Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2

Throughout history, religions and ideologies did not sanctify life itself. They always sanctified something above or beyond earthly existence, and were consequently quite tolerant of death.

Los que una vez fueron víctimas de la historia es probable que vuelvan a serlo otra vez. Y aquellos a los que la historia ha concedido privilegios tienen más probabilidades de obtenerlos de nuevo.

History's Biggest Fraud

Sauf à vous satisfaire de confier l'avenir de la vie aux résultats trimestriels, vous avez besoin d'une idée claire de la vie et de ses enjeux.

The fact is that a jumbo brain is a jumbo drain on the body. It's not easy to carry around, especially when encased inside a massive skull. It's even harder to fuel. In 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.

The discrepancy between evolutionary succes and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.

in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation-states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism, or Jewish physics. So how do we make people feel loyal to one human tribe and hostile to another?

The imagined order is embedded in the material world. Though the imagined order exists only in our minds, it can be woven into the material reality around us,

Is the division into men and women a product of the imagination, like the caste system in India and the racial system in America, or is it a natural division with deep biological roots? And if it is indeed a natural division, are there also biological explanations for the preference given to men over women?

adopt illiberal policies toward foreigners.

La moral no significa «seguir los mandatos divinos». Significa «reducir el sufrimiento».

It is easy for us to accept that the division of people into 'superiors' and 'commoners' is a figment of the imagination. Yet the idea that all humans are equal is also a myth.

Around 10,000 BC, before the transition to agriculture, earth was home to about 5–8 million nomadic foragers. By the first century AD, only 1–2 million foragers remained (mainly in Australia, America and Africa), but their numbers were dwarfed by the world's 250 million farmers.1

John Stuart Mill, explained that happiness is nothing but pleasure and freedom from pain, and that beyond pleasure and pain there is no good and no evil. Anyone who tries to deduce good and evil from something else (such as the word of God, or the national interest) is fooling you, and perhaps fooling himself too.

Yet the Soviet elite, and the Communist regimes through most of eastern Europe (Romania and Serbia were the exceptions), chose not to use even a tiny fraction of this military power. When its members realised that Communism was bankrupt, they renounced force, admitted their failure, packed their suitcases and went home.

Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids. Only the names, shapes and sizes of these pyramids change from one culture to the other. They

a) Convertibilidad universal: con el dinero como alquimista, se puede convertir la tierra en lealtad, la justicia en salud y la violencia en conocimiento. b) Confianza universal: con el dinero como intermediario, cualesquiera dos personas pueden cooperar en cualquier proyecto.

In contrast, over the course of the next 1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.