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Yuval Noah Harari
287 quotes
“In the late nineteenth century... [~]40 million Chinese, a tenth of the... population, were addicts.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Middle Ages, was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eight kilograms in the early nineteenth century.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.., [~]10 million African slaves were imported to America. ...[~]70 per cent... worked on the s.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For decades was much more expensive than gold. ...Napoleon III... commissioned cutlery... for... distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more... as a... positive... It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves.., even kill themselves slowly by .”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religious holidays... have become shopping festivals.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Obesity is a double victory... [E]ating little... will lead to economic contraction... [E]at too much and... buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are... a merger of commandments. The... rich... 'Invest!' The... rest... 'Buy!'”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our... green and blue planet is becoming... concrete and plastic...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Industrial Revolution turned the time table and the assembly line into a template... [S]chools... adopted... timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores. ...[I]n places devoid of assembly lines and machines, the timetable became king.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time. rather than the local times of Liverpool. Manchester and Glasgow.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying ecconimic and legal rights independently of their family and community.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Consumerism and nationalism... make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community.., that we... have a common past.., interest and... future. This isn't a lie. It's imagination.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As long as millions of Germans believe in... a German nation, get excited at... national symbols, retell... national myths, and... sacrifice money, time and limbs for the... nation, Germany will remain one of the strongest powers...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“California['s] wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is... and ― Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite - politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“International wars became rare only after 1945, largely thanks to the new threat of nuclear annihilation.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For 2500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and cause of happiness. which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism's original characteristics.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[I]f humankind doesn’t annihilate itself... the Scientific Revolution... may turn out to be the most important bological revolution...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing new about biological engineering per se. People have been using it for millennia...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Scientists believe that we will soon have bionic arms that will... be able to transmit signals back to the brain... enabling... the sense of touch.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The era of personalised medicine... that matches treatment to DNA... has begun.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he Frankenstein story appears to warn... that if we try to... engineer life we will be punished...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination... everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people will be living... on Mars and Pluto. ...[N]obody foresaw the Internet.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal... in... Africa. ...[I]t transformed... into the master of the... planet and... terror of the ecosystem.., on the verge of... eternal youth... [with] divine abilities of creation and destruction.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[H]ow did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts..? ...[H]umans created imagined orders and devised scripts... The imagined orders sustaining... networks... divided people into [a] make-believe hierarchy. Superiors got... the good things... Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]or the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the... life of most humans ran... within three ancient frames: the nuclear family.., extended family and... local intimate community. ...The family was... the welfare.., health.., education system.., construction industry.., pension fund.., insurance company.., radio.., television.., newspapers.., bank and... police.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Buddha’s recommendation was to stop... the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? ...[N]ever admit that the order is imagined.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]rom a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has... no meaning... the outcome of blind evolutionary processes... without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of... divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up... the universe would... keep going... business as usual. ...[H]uman subjectivity would not be missed. ...[M]eaning ...people ascribe to their lives is... delusion.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[P]erhaps happiness is synchronising... personal delusions.. with... prevailing collective delusions.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he modern world fails to square liberty with equality.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[[Contradiction|[C]ontradiction]]s are culture’s engines, responsible for... creativity and dynamism... Just as... clashing musical notes... force... music forward.., discord in... thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have... increased food production, built cities, established empires and created... trade networks. But did we decrease... suffering..? ...[M]assive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[W]e have... made... progress... with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating... and the improvement in... humanity is... fragile...”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Today more than ninety per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Consider the chicken, for example. Ten thousand years ago it was a rare bird confined to small niches of South Asia. Today billions of chickens live on almost every continent and island, bar Antarctica. The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue. It concerns the majority of Earth's large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but who live and die as cogs in an industrial production line.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens.”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...Suppose you have two free hours a week, and are uncertain whether to use them playing chess or tennis. A good friend might ask: 'What does your heart tell you?' 'Well,' you answer, 'as far as my heart is concerned, it’s obvious tennis is better. It’s also better for my cholesterol level and blood pressure. But my fMRI scans indicate I should strengthen my left pre-frontal cortex. In my family dementia is quite common, and my uncle had it at a very early age. The latest studies indicate that a weekly game of chess can help delay its onset.'”
Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source