“The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today.”

To understand modern economic history, you really need to understand just a single word. The word is growth. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, the modern economy has been growing like a hormone-soused teenager. It eats up everything it can find and puts on inches faster than you can count.

The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility. A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luckily luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.”

“Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?”

“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.”

“there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.”

“There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time.”

“Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows…History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”

Racism was replaced by culturism.Today's elites usually justify superiority in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races. We no longer say, 'It’s in their blood.” We say, "It”s in their culture.”

“Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.”

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

A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.

Impactful quotes, hand-selected, from Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

New York Times BestsellerA Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.

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Religion & Spirituality

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History

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Society, Arts & Culture

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Science & Nature

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli public intellectual, historian and professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the popular science bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI

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