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" We did not domesticate wheat; wheat domesticated us. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Wheat
Did
Us
Related Quotes:
" Humans have an amazing capacity to believe in contradictory things. For example, to believe in an omnipotent and benevolent God but somehow excuse Him from all the suffering in the world. Or our ability to believe from the standpoint of law that humans are equal and have free will and from biology that humans are just organic machines. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Amazing
God
Him
" 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
Liberal
World
Story
" 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
" 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
Authority
Like
You
" I was taught that if you're going to study something, you must understand it deeply and be familiar with primary sources. But if you write a history of the whole world, you can't do this. That's the trade-off. "
Yuval Noah Harari
You
World
Understand
" 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
Data
Human
Authority
" 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
Intelligence
Want
Power
" 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
" 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
" 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
Years
Last
Impact
" There is no limit to how much health you can provide people. "
Yuval Noah Harari
You
Limit
How
" The feelings of the individual are the prime authority in ethics. 'If it feels good, do it' is the basic ethical ideal of humanism. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Basic
Good
Ethics
" 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
" 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
" What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness? "
Yuval Noah Harari
More
Consciousness
Intelligence
" 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
People
You
Gossip
" 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
Culture
World
Truth Is
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" We are probably one of the last generations of Homo sapiens. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Generations
Sapiens
Last
" 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
" If you think about the great religions that have united large parts of humankind, people believe gods are very concrete - there is an angry old man in the sky, and if I do something wrong, he will punish me. "
Yuval Noah Harari
Man
Great
Angry
" 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
You
Yourself
Scary
" For thousands of years, humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. "
Yuval Noah Harari
People
Years
Modern
" 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
" 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
" 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
Home
Husband
He