Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Humanist thinkers such as Rousseau convinced us that our own feelings and desires were the ultimate source of meaning and that our free will was, therefore, the highest authority of all. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Authority
Free
Meaning
Related Quotes:
" Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Make
Try
Sense
" If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Together
You
People
" Traditionally, life has been divided into two main parts: a period of learning followed by a period of working. Very soon, this traditional model will become utterly obsolete, and the only way for humans to stay in the game will be to keep learning throughout their lives and to reinvent themselves repeatedly. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Two
Game
Learning
" We can suspend disbelief about Harry Potter, and we do the same thing with God, and we do the same thing with human rights, and we do the same thing with money. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Money
Human Rights
Human
" All the major problems of the world today are global in essence, and they cannot be solved unless through some kind of global cooperation. It's not just climate change, which is, like, the most obvious example people give. I think more in terms of technological disruption. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Today
Think
Change
" Most people, they get overwhelmed by the religious stories, the nationalist stories, by the economic stories of the day, and take these stories to be the reality. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Take
Reality
Day
" Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Aim
Now
Survival
" You take fantasies, which for thousands of years belonged to the religious realm - overcoming death or our merging with the universe - and you suddenly start talking about them in a more technical perspective as something that can be achieved, not after you die with the help of supernatural beings, but in this very life with the help of technology. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Life
Death
Technology
" Everybody since the '60s has been saying the nation is a fiction - the nation is an imaginary unity - but people didn't connect the dots and say all human endeavours sprang from the same principle. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Saying
Say
Same
" I don't like the word 'abstractions' very much because most people don't think in abstractions. That is too difficult for them. They think in stories. And the best stories are not abstract; they are concrete. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Think
Abstract
Difficult
" The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Thinking
Always
Unique
" For thousands of years, until about 1850, you see humans accumulating more and more power by the invention of new technologies and by new systems of organization in the economy and in politics, but you don't see any real improvement in the well-being of the average person. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Politics
Improvement
You
" Our bodies and minds evolved and were adapted for hundreds of thousands of years for tasks like climbing a tree and picking apples, or hunting rabbits, or looking for mushrooms in the forest. They were not adapted to the very gruelling work that is involved in field work - ploughing, harvesting, bringing water, digging weeds - things like that. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Forest
Looking
Tree
" I'm not a very glamorous person. I like to just sit alone in a room and read a book or meditate. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Person
Sit
Room
" Dataism is a new ethical system that says, yes, humans were special and important because up until now they were the most sophisticated data processing system in the universe, but this is no longer the case. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Now
Universe
Data
" The basic human reaction to pleasure is not satisfaction, but rather craving for more. Hence, no matter what we achieve, it only increases our craving, not our satisfaction. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Satisfaction
Matter
Achieve
" We did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated us. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Wheat
Did
Us
" Ignorance is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, then this is a toxic mix. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Dangerous
You
Toxic
" I try to be a realist and not a pessimist or an optimist. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Try
Optimist
Pessimist
" When you look at the growth of the human economy and its expected growth in the twenty-first century, I expect health will be the most important market of all. Especially as we move from a concept of health which focuses on healing the sick to a concept of upgrading the healthy. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Health
Sick
Healing
" Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, and consciousness is the ability to feel things and have subjective experiences. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Feel
Ability
Problems
" You go to a Japanese restaurant and have a wonderful dish, and the thing to do is take a picture with your phone, put it on Facebook, and see how many likes you get. If you don't share your experiences, they don't become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Data
Phone
Picture
" In order to survive in a very small tribe, you needed to know how to do lots of things for yourself: how to make your tools, how to get food, and how to make your clothes - things most of us today don't need to know. The only thing I need to survive is to know history. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Yourself
Food
History
" Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, whereas consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love, and anger. Throughout history, intelligence always went hand in hand with consciousness. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Anger
Intelligence
Love
" I titled the book 'Homo Deus' because we really are becoming gods in the most literal sense possible. We are acquiring abilities that have always been thought to be divine abilities - in particular, the ability to create life. And we can do with that whatever we want. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Want
Book
Create
" Techno-humanism aims to amplify the power of humans, creating cyborgs and connecting humans to computers, but it still sees human interests and desires as the highest authority in the universe. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Authority
Universe
Power
" Science is telling us that the reason people die is not because some god said so or because the laws of nature mandate it. People always die because of technical problems. And every technical problem has, in principle, a technical solution. "
Yuval Noah Harari
People
God
Nature
" What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster. If Amazon knows you better than you know yourself, then the game is up. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Run
Yourself
Focus
" As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth and power might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms, creating unprecedented social and political inequality. Alternatively, the algorithms might themselves become the owners. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Political
Hands
Wealth
" My main ambition as a historian is to figure out what's really happening in the world, instead of the fictions that humans have been creating for thousands of years in order to explain or control what's happening in the world. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Ambition
Out
Creating