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" I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. "

Yuval Noah Harari

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

Yuval Noah Harari

" For many centuries, even thousands of years, patriotism worked quite well. Of course, it led to wars an so forth, but we shouldn't focus too much on the bad. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" I met my husband Itzik when I got back home to Israel from Oxford in 2002. He is my Internet-of-all-Things. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" We did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated us. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" I grew up in a small industrial suburb of Haifa in Israel. As far back as I remember, I was interested in big questions. Who are we? What are we doing here? But the chances to discuss philosophy were quite thin on the ground. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories. "

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

" Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Many people in their teens wonder about these big questions - what's the meaning of life, what are we doing here - then somewhere in their 20s, they seem to say, 'I'll just get married. I'll just have kids. I'll get back to that later.' But they never do. For me, it kept boiling. "

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

" Humans are extremely good in acquiring new power, but they are not very good in translating this power into greater happiness, which is why we are far more powerful than ever before but we don't seem to be much happier. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" In the 1990s and 2000s, the liberal story shaped not only the foreign policy of the United States and its allies, but also the domestic policies of governments across the world, from South Africa to Indonesia. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Increasingly, our decisions will be made by the algorithms that surround us. Whenever there is a big dilemma, you just ask Google what to do. And what kind of life is that? "

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

" 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

" If we are allowed to do experiments on monkeys because we are superior to them in a certain way, then someone who is superior to me is allowed to do experiments on me. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" Dollar bills have absolutely no value except in our collective imagination, but everybody believes in the dollar bill. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

Yuval Noah Harari

" The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" 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

" Modernity is a deal. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. "

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

" We are probably one of the last generations of Homo sapiens. "

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