Yuval Noah Harari Quotes Page 2


 
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Best 65 Quotes by Yuval Noah Harari – Page 2 of 3

21 Lessons for the 21st Century Quotes

“Philosophers are very patient people, but engineers are far less patient, and investors are the least patient of all.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Secular education teaches us that if we don’t know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of acknowledging our ignorance and looking for new evidence. Even if we think we know something, we shouldn’t be afraid of doubting our opinions and checking ourselves again.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Silence isn’t neutrality; it is supporting the status-quo.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“Switch from panic mode to bewilderment.
Panic is a form of hubris. It comes from the smug feeling that I know exactly where the world is heading – down.

Bewilderment is more humble, and therefore more clear-sighted. If you feel like running down the street crying ‘The apocalypse is upon us!’, try telling yourself ‘No, it’s not that. Truth is, I just don’t understand what’s going on in the world.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“We should never underestimate human stupidity. Both on the personal and on the collective level, humans are prone to engage in self-destructive activities.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“When a thousand people believe some made-up story for a month – that's fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years – that's religion, and we are admonished to call it fake news in oder not to for the feelings of the faithful.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

H*mo Deus Quotes

“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”

H*mo Deus

“People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.”

H*mo Deus

“Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”

H*mo Deus

“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realized how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”

H*mo Deus

“This is the best reason to learn history: not in order to predict the future, but to free yourself of the past and imagine alternative destinies. Of course this is not total freedom – we cannot avoid being shaped by the past. But some freedom is better than none.”

H*mo Deus

“We do not become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. The bad news is that as conditions improve, expectations balloon.”

H*mo Deus

“You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.”

H*mo Deus

Sapiens Quotes

“Biology enables, Culture forbids.”

Sapiens

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“A true scientist is bored by knowledge; it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him – the mysteries that previous discoveries have revealed.”


More quotes by Matt Ridley

“Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha’s recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.”

Sapiens

“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”

Sapiens

“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”

Sapiens

“Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. ”

Sapiens

“Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world.”

Sapiens

“Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.”

Sapiens

“From the viewpoint of the herd, rather than that of the shepherd, it’s hard to avoid the impression that for the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe. Their evolutionary ‘success’ is meaningless. A rare wild rhinoceros on the brink of extinction is probably more satisfied than a calf who spends its short life inside a tiny box, fattened to produce juicy steaks. The contented rhinoceros is no less content for being among the last of its kind. The numerical success of the calf’s species is little consolation for the suffering the individual endures.”

Sapiens

“Happiness does not really depend on objective conditions of either wealth, health or even community. Rather, it depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.”

Sapiens

“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.”

Sapiens

“How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.”

Sapiens

“Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”

Sapiens

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”

Sapiens

“Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.”

Sapiens

“Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community.* Most people worked in the family business – the family farm or the family workshop, for example – or they worked in their neighbours’ family businesses. The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.”

Sapiens

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“Open-plan offices have been found to reduce productivity and impair memory. They’re associated with high staff turnover. They make people sick, hostile, unmotivated, and insecure.”


More quotes by Susan Cain

 
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