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

Yuval Noah Harari

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" About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story. "

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

" 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

" 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

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

Yuval Noah Harari

" I think, in general, medicine in the 21st century will switch from healing the sick to upgrading the healthy... If you find ways to repair the memory damaged by Alzheimer's disease or dementia and so forth, it is very likely that the same methods could be used to upgrade the memory of completely healthy people. "

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

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

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" People have long feared that mechanization might cause mass unemployment. This never happened because, as old professions became obsolete, new professions evolved, and there was always something humans could do better than machines. Yet this is not a law of nature, and nothing guarantees it will continue to be like that in the future. "

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

" 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

" Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it. "

Yuval Noah Harari

Taken For Granted

" 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. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" When the first humans reached Australia about 45,000 years ago, they quickly drove to extinction 90% of its large animals. This was the first significant impact that Homo sapiens had on the planet's ecosystem. It was not the last. "

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

" 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

" Fundamentally, mankind was unimportant in the ecological system. Then, in one fell swoop, an evolutionary blink of an eye, the human race is transformed from something unimportant to the most important thing in the world. "

Yuval Noah Harari

" 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

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

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

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

Yuval Noah Harari

" The key to victory lies more in manipulation and cooperation than in exceptional personal skills. "

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

" Every day, I absorb countless data bits through emails, phone calls, and articles; process the data; and transmit back new bits through more emails, phone calls, and articles. I don't really know where I fit into the great scheme of things and how my bits of data connect with the bits produced by billions of other humans and computers. "

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

" 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