Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" Buddhism maintains that the common reaction of the human mind to pleasure and to achievement is not satisfaction; it's craving for more. "

Yuval Noah Harari

Related Quotes:

" In Judaism or Christianity and so forth, you invent rules that don't exist anywhere except in your imagination. You spend your life trying to gain points and to avoid all kinds of things that detract from your points. And if by the time you die you gather enough points, then you pass on to the next level, in Heaven. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Take Google Maps or Waze. On the one hand, they amplify human ability - you are able to reach your destination faster and more easily. But at the same time, you are shifting the authority to the algorithm and losing your ability to find your own way. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy, or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Those who refuse to liberalise and globalise are doomed to failure. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" The widespread assumption is that somehow, the brain produces the mind; somehow millions of neurons fire signals at one another create or produce consciousness... but we have no idea how or why this happens. I'm afraid that in many cases, people in the tech world fail to understand that. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" There is a saying that if you get something for free, you should know that you're the product. It was never more true than in the case of Facebook and Gmail and YouTube. You get free social-media services, and you get free funny cat videos. In exchange, you give up the most valuable asset you have, which is your personal data. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness? "

Yuval Noah Harari

" The notion of superhumans is using bioengineering and artificial intelligence to upgrade human abilities. If they use the power to change themselves, to change their own minds, their own desires, then we have no idea what they will want to do. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" I try to be a realist and not a pessimist or an optimist. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" I'm vegan, though not completely religious about it. While writing 'Sapiens,' I became familiar with how we treat animals in the meat and dairy industries. I was so horrified that I didn't want to be a part of it anymore. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" 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

" All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" Humans have two kinds of abilities: physical and cognitive. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" We are living in a global world - but most schools and books still tell us only parochial histories of one particular country or culture. The truth is that there are no longer any independent countries in the world. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" It's very, very difficult to reinvent yourself when you're 40 or 50, whether you are a taxi driver who now needs to become a web designer, or anything else. It just becomes more difficult and more scary. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" I'm a historian. I really like the past. But most people seem far more interested in what you can tell them about the future. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" You need to constantly remind yourself what is the most important thing that is happening in the world - what is the most important thing that is happening in history. The discipline to have this focus is something I gained from meditation. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Homo sapiens is a social being, and our well-being depends to a large extent on the quality and depth of our social and family relations - and in the last 200 years, they have been disintegrating. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Ignorance is not too dangerous. If you combine it with power, then this is a toxic mix. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" If you don't like the word 'religion,' you can replace it with 'ideology' - it's largely the same thing. At the heart of both religion and ideology is the question of authority and where authority is coming from. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" 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

" The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it. "

Yuval Noah Harari