“Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so.”

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“Industrial farming is one of the worst crimes in history... the fate of industrially farmed animals [is] one of the most pressing ethical questions of our time.”

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“If governments and corporations succeed in hacking the human animal, the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.”

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“Things are better than ever before. Things are still quite bad. Things can get much worse. This adds up to a somewhat optimistic view because if you realize things are better than before, this means we can make them even better.”

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“a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering... This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.”

from Sapiens

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“We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.”

from Sapiens

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“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. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.”

from Sapiens

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“When Alexander the Great once visited Diogenes as he was relaxing in the sun and asked if there were anything he might do for him, the Cynic answered the all-powerful conqueror, 'Yes, there is something you can do for me. Please move a little to the side. You are blocking the sunlight.'”

from Sapiens

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“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.”

from Sapiens

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“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’”

from Sapiens

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“The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist–consumerist ideal.”

from Sapiens

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“[Capitalist–consumerism] is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do... most people today successfully live up to this ideal... the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money and the masses give free reign to their cravings and passions and buy more and more.”

from Sapiens

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“Consistency is the playground of dull minds.”

from Sapiens

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from Sapiens

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

from Sapiens

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“So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.”

from Sapiens

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

from Sapiens

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“The romantic contrast between modern industry that 'destroys nature' and our ancestors who 'lived in harmony with nature' is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.”

from Sapiens

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“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.”

from Sapiens

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“The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.”

from Sapiens

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“Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths. Any large-scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination.”

from Sapiens

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“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.”

from Sapiens

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“In 2012 about 56 million people died throughout the world; 620,000 of them died due to human violence (war killed 120,000 people, and crime killed another 500,000). In contrast, 800,000 committed suicide, and 1.5 million died of diabetes. Sugar is now more dangerous than gunpowder.”

from Sapiens

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“Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don’t tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night.”

from Sapiens

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“Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, ‘we’ and ‘they’.”

from Sapiens

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

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“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.”

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.”

from Sapiens

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“In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.
”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“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.”

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“Every day millions of people decide to grant their smartphone a bit more control over their lives or try a new and more effective antidepressant drug. In pursuit of health, happiness and power, humans will gradually change first one of their features and then another, and another, until they will no longer be human.”

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“The Agricultural Revolution was a trap... This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”

from Sapiens

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“Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible. If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product... Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.”

from Sapiens

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“Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism... [it] tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can... go traveling in distant lands, sample various kinds of relationships, try different cuisines, different styles of music”

from Sapiens

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“Like the elite of ancient Egypt, most people in most cultures dedicate their lives to building pyramids... Few question the myths that cause us to desire the pyramid in the first place.”

from Sapiens

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“True, hundreds of millions may nevertheless go on believing in Islam, Christianity or Hinduism. But numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators rather than by the backward-looking masses.”

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“Ten thousand years ago most people were hunter-gatherers and only a few pioneers in the Middle East were farmers. Yet the future belonged to the farmers. In 1850 more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants, and in the small villages along the Ganges, the Nile and the Yangtze nobody knew anything about steam engines, railroads or telegraph lines. Yet the fate of those peasants had already been sealed in Manchester and Birmingham by the handful of engineers, politicians and financiers who spearheaded the Industrial Revolution. Steam engines, railroads and telegraphs transformed the production of food, textiles, vehicles and weapons, giving industrial powers a decisive edge over traditional agricultural societies.”

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“When I think of the mystery of existence, I prefer to use other words, so as to avoid confusion. And unlike the God of the Islamic State and the Crusades – who cares a lot about names and above all about His most holy name – the mystery of existence doesn’t care an iota what names we apes give it.

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

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“I cannot name the 8 million people who share my Israeli citizenship, I have never met most of them, and I am very unlikely ever to meet them in the future. My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

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“Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of chronic air pollution?”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

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“In the 1930s Japanese generals, admirals, economists and journalists concurred that without control of Korea, Manchuria and the Chinese coast, Japan was doomed to economic stagnation. They were all wrong. In fact, the famed Japanese economic miracle began only after Japan lost all its mainland conquests.”

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“The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

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“Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralized data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia”

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals.”

from Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

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“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.”

from Sapiens

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“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 neighbors’ 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.”

from Sapiens

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“The food surpluses produced by peasants, coupled with new transportation technology, eventually enabled more and more people to cram together first into large villages, then into towns, and finally into cities, all of them joined together by new kingdoms and commercial networks.”

from Sapiens

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“Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.”

from Introduction to Animal Liberation (2015)

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“In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

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“The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will forever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do no really know what to make of it.”

from Sapiens

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“The imperial vision of dominion over the entire world could be imminent... More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority... global problems, such as melting ice caps, nibbles away at whatever legitimacy remains to the independent nation states... wouldn't it be simpler for a single global government to safeguard them?”

from Sapiens

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“When humans learned to farm in the Agricultural Revolution, their collective power to shape their environment increased, but the lot of many individual humans grew harsher. Peasants had to work harder than foragers to eke out less varied and nutritious food, and they were far more exposed to disease and exploitation”

from Sapiens

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“Were it not for businessmen seeking to make money, Columbus would not have reached America James Cook would not have reached Australia, and Neil Armstrong would never have taken that small step on the surface of the moon.”

from Sapiens

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“Throughout the world, more and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts, scholars, lawyers, and managers... must ponder whether to answer the imperial call—with a growing disregard for the borders and opinions of states—or to remain loyal to their state and their people. More and more choose the empire.”

from Sapiens

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“religion is often considered a source of discrimination, disagreement and disunion. Yet in fact, religion has been the third great unifier of humankind, alongside money and empires... Religions assert that our laws are not the result of human caprice... thereby ensuring social stability.”

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“Much of ancient mythology is in fact a legal contract in which humans promise everlasting devotion to the gods in exchange for mastery over plants and animals—the first chapters of the book of Genesis are a prime example. For thousands of years, religious liturgy consisted mainly of humans sacrificing lambs, wine and cakes to divine powers who in exchange promised abundant harvests and fecund flocks.”

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“The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and Hindus built no temples to Atman... The fundamental insight of polytheism is that the supreme power governing the world is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares, and worries of humans.”

from Sapiens

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“Smith's claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profit is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history... What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.”

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“Capitalism's belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely... Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.”

from Sapiens

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“Napoleon made fun of the British, calling them a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon himself, and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen.”

from Sapiens

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“What good was the French Revolution? If people did not become any happier, then what was the point of all that chaos, fear, blood, and war?... People think that this political revolution or that social reform will make them happy, but their biochemistry tricks them time and again.”

from Sapiens

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“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... happiness consists in seeing one's life in its entirety as meaningful and worthwhile.”

from Sapiens

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“Huxley's vision of the future is far more troubling than George Orwell's 1984. Huxley's world seems monstrous to most readers, but it is hard to explain why. Everybody is happy all the time — what could be wrong with that.”

from Sapiens

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“Capitalism distinguishes 'capital' from mere 'wealth'. Capital consists of money, goods, and resources that are invested in production. Wealth on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities.”

from Sapiens

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“Only 40 years passed between the moment Einstein determined that any kind of mass could be converted into energy—that's what E=mc2 means—and the moment atom bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nuclear power stations mushroomed all over the globe.”

from Sapiens

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“The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. Whoever believes in progress believes that geographical discoveries, technological inventions and organizational developments can increase the sum total of human production, trade and wealth... I can become wealthy without you becoming poor; I can be obese without you dying of hunger.”

from Sapiens

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“The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans... the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way... Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.”

from Sapiens

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“We are more powerful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power... Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.”

from Sapiens

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“Consumerism encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption. Frugality is a disease to be cured.”

from Sapiens

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“The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions—and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do.”

from Sapiens

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“everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or traveling to Fiji won't make any difference.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

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“If you can understand what happens to you as one moment ends and another moment begins, you will also understand what will happen to you at the moment of death.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“We humans have conquered the world thanks to our ability to create and believe fictional stories. We are therefore particularly bad at knowing the difference between fiction and reality.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“For years I had lived under the impression that I was the master of my life, the CEO of my own personal brand. But a few hours of meditation were enough to show me that I had hardly any control over myself. I was not the CEO; I was barely the gatekeeper.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“If we understand that our desires are not the magical manifestations of free choice but are rather the product of biochemical processes (influenced by cultural factors that are also beyond our control), we might be less preoccupied with them.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“both the 'self' and freedom are mythological chimeras borrowed from the fairy tales of ancient times... in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the 'self' is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite... Like the government spin doctors... my inner propaganda machine creates a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the truth.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“consciousness is the greatest mystery in the universe, and mundane feelings of heat and itching are every bit as mysterious as feelings of rapture or cosmic oneness”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don't realize that they are already trapped inside one—their brain—which is locked within the bigger box of human society with its myriad fictions... your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching... the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo sapiens by completely different beings”

from Sapiens

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“the real question facing us is not, 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.”

from Sapiens

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“A ritual is a magical act that makes the abstract concrete and the fictional real. The essence of ritual is the magical spell 'Hocus-pocus [Hoc est corpus] X is Y!... powerful spells that transform a frog into a prince and a pumpkin into a carriage.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Most stories are held together by the weight of their roof rather than by the strength of their foundations. Consider the Christian story. It has the flimsiest of foundations. What evidence do we have [and yet] Entire wars have been waged over changing a single word of the story.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“the most prophetic science-fiction book of the 20th century... reading Brave New Word is a disconcerting and challenging experience in large part because you are hard-pressed to put your finger on what exactly makes it dystopian... Huxley's genius consists in showing that you can control people far more securely through love and pleasure than through fear and violence.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic – rather, it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports – and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The Jewish tradition is full of deep insights and noble values—though it is also full of questionable ideas and of racist, misogynist, and homophobic attitudes... Jewish orthodoxy, which even today holds that Jews are intrinsically superior to all other humans... Israeli Jews, who are educated from kindergarten to think that Judaism is the superstar of human history... People fed on such a historical diet have a very hard time digesting the idea that Judaism had relatively little impact on the world as a whole.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“science fiction tends to confuse intelligence with consciousness. As a result, it is overly concerned about a potential war between robots and humans, when in fact we need to fear a conflict between a small superhuman elite empowered by algorithms and a vast underclass of disempowered Homo sapiens... Karl Marx is still a better guide than Steven Spielberg.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“We believe that buying more stuff will make us happy because we saw the capitalist paradise with our own eyes on television.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Nationalism—an escapist indulgence that may doom humankind and the entire biosphere to disaster... Zealous nationalists who cry 'Our country first!' should ask themselves whether their country by itself, without a robust system of international cooperation, can protect the world—or even itself—from nuclear destruction.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“In the 1930's Japanese generals, admirals, economists, and journalists concurred that without control of Korea, Manchuria, and the Chinese coast, Japan was doomed to economic stagnation. They were all wrong. In fact, the famed Japanese economic miracle began only atter Japan lost all of its mainland conquests... It was all just a stupid miscalculation.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Human stupidity is one of the most important forces in history, yet we often tend to discount it... The problem is that the world is far more complicated than a chessboard, and human rationality is not up to the task of really understanding it... Even if war is catastrophic for everyone, no god and no law of nature protect us from human stupidity.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The Old Testament, the Talmud, and many (though not all) rabbis maintained that the life of a Jew is more valuable than the life of a Gentile, which is why, for example, Jews are allowed to desecrate the Sabbath in order to save a Jew from death but are forbidden to do so merely in order to save a Gentile”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“From an ethical perspective, monotheism was arguably one of the worst ideas in human history... What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars... as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and religious discrimination.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The problem with evil is that in real life it is not necessarily ugly. It can look beautiful... That is why it is difficult to resist Satan's temptations. That is also why it is difficult to deal with fascism.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“even Hitler didn't manage to make people forget all their alternative stories... no sooner had Hitler shot a bullet through his brain than people in Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich adopted new identities and found new meaning in their lives.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo sapiens... false stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people... If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you... if you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored... Better to try your luck with chimps.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“see even the Islamic State as an errant offshoot of the global culture we all share... radical Islamists have been influence by Marx and Foucault as much as by Muhammad... Islamic fundamentalism may indeed pose a radical challenge, but the 'civilization' it challenges is a global civilization rather than a uniquely Western phenomenon.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“It is particularly ironic when Christian leaders such as Barack Obama have the temerity to tell self-professing Muslims like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi what it means to be Muslim... Islam has no fixed DNA. Islam is whatever Muslims make of it.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Most people tend to believe they are the center of the world and their culture is the linchpin of human history... Personally, I am all too familiar with such crass egotism because the Jews, my own people, also think that they are the most important thing in the world... Needless to say, the British, French, Germans, Americans, Russians, Japanese, and countless other groups are similarly convinced that humankind would have lived in barbarous and immoral ignorance if it hadn't been for the spectacular achievements of their nation.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Morality, art, spirituality, and creativity are universal human abilities embedded in our DNA. Their genesis was in Stone Age Africa. It is therefore crass egotism to ascribe to them a more recent place and time, be it China in the age of the Yellow Emperor, Greece in the age of Plato, or Arabia in the age of Muhammad.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The Hebrew Old Testament eventually became a cornerstone of global human culture because it was warmly embraced by Christianity... In contrast, the Talmud—whose importance to Jewish culture far surpasses that of the Old Testament—was rejected... a great pity because the Talmud is a far more thoughtful and compassionate book than the Old Testament.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Humans have a remarkable ability to know and not know at the same time. Or, more correctly, they can know something when they really think about it but most of the time they don't think about it.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“As a species, humans prefer power to truth... Truth and power can travel together only so far. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions... whether Christian priests, Confucian mandarins, or Communist ideologues—placed unity above truth. That's why they were so powerful.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“the 21st century might create the most unequal societies in history. Though globalization and the internet bridge the gap between countries, they threaten to enlarge the rift between classes.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“military globalization: War spreads ideas, technologies, and people far more quickly than commerce does... People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners. For every American film about Taiwan, there are probably fifty about Vietnam.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“For all the national pride people feel when their delegation wins a gold medal and their flag is raised, there is far greater reason to feel pride that humankind is capable of organizing such an event.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Humans control the world because they can cooperate better than any other animal, and they can cooperate so well because they believe in fictions.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again, until people become convinced it is the truth.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“the power of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“For years I lived under the impression that I was the master of my life, and the CEO of my own personal brand. But a few hours of meditation were enough to show me that I hardly had any control of myself. I was not the CEO – I was barely the gatekeeper.”

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“Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament.”

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“Humans certainly have a will – but it isn’t free. You cannot decide what desires you have... Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.”

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“In ethics, the humanist motto is 'if it feels good, do it'. In politics, humanism instructs us that 'the voter knows best'. In aesthetics, humanism says that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder'... What, then, will happen once we realize that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we have the technology to calculate, design or outsmart their feelings?”

from Homo Deus (2017)

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“guided by the principle of protecting humans rather than jobs... we need to develop new social and economic models as soon as possible... Many jobs are uninspiring drudgery and are not worth saving. Nobody's life's dream is to be a cashier.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“the Anna Karenina principle: successful states are all alike, but every failed state fails in its own way”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“the dollar bill is universally venerated across all political and religious divides. though it has no intrinsic value, trust in the dollar is so firm that it is shared even by Islamic fundamentalists, Mexican drug lords, and North Korean tyrants.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“almost everybody believes in a slightly different variation on the same capitalist theme, and we are all cogs within a single global production line... the same economic theories, the same corporations and banks, and the same currents of capital.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace, and the Harry Potter books... much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous, and creative... billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years. Some fake news lasts forever.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities; the mnd is an object this is being shaped by history and biology... the mind is never free of manipulation.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war. And if you think you can press some delete button and wipe out all trace of Hollywood from your subconscious and your limbic system, you are deluding yourself.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Homo sapiens is a storytelling animal that thinks in stories rather than in numbers or graphs, and believes that the universe itself wo;rks like a story, replete with heroes and villains, conflicts and resolutions, climaxes and happy endings... we want a story that will explain what reality is all about and what my particular role is in the cosmic drama.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Gandhi's reading of the Vedas caused him to envision independent India as a collection of self-sufficient agrarian communities, each spinning its own khadi cloth, exporting little and importing even less... Yet this Arcadian vision was simply incompatible with the realities of modern economics, and for that reason not much has remained of it save for Gandhi's radiant image on billion of rupee notes.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“There is just no such thing as 'Christian economics,' 'Muslim economics,' or 'Hindu economics.' ... When you compare the economic policies of Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, Jewish Israel, Hindu India, and Christian America, you just don't see that much of a difference.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“It is the long-honed expertise of religious scholars in reinterpreting texts that makes religion irrelevant. No matter which economic policy Khamenei chooses, he can always square it with the Quran. Therefore the Quran is degraded from a source of true knowledge to a source of mere authority.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“the mark of science is the willingness to admit failure and try a different tack. That's why scientists learn how to grow better crops and make better medicines, whereas priests and gurus learn only how to make better excuses... why the entire world has increasingly become a single civilization.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“The true expertise of priests and gurus has never really been rainmaking, healing, prophesy, or magic. Rather, it has always been interpretation... A priest is somebody who knows how to justify why the rain dance failed, and why we must keep believing in our god even though he seems deaf to all our prayers.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“If you feel overwhelmed and confused by the global predicament, you are on the right track.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“It takes a lot of courage to fight biases and oppressive regimes, but it takes even grater courage to admit ignorance and venture into the unknown.”

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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“Our ancestors made the world what it is. We can decide what the world will become.”

from Unstoppable Us

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“For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide that are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In the earth 21st Century, the average human is far more likely to die from binging on McDonald's than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack”

from Homo Deus

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“In 2014 more than 2.1 billion people were overweight, compared to 850 million who suffered from malnutrition Half of humankind is expected to be overweight by 2030. In 2010 famine and malnutrition combined killed about 1 million people, whereas obesity killed 3 million.”

from Homo Deus

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“When the moment comes to choose between economic growth and ecological stability, politicians, CEOs and voters almost always prefer growth. In the twenty-first century, we shall have to do better if we are to avoid catastrophe.”

from Homo Deus

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“Success breeds ambition... The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more... Humans are always on the lookout for something better, bigger, tastier.”

from Homo Deus

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“The scientists that cry immortality are like the boy who cried wolf: sooner or later, the wolf actually comes... If you think that religious fanatics with burning eyes and flowing beards are ruthless, just wait and see what elderly retail moguls and ageing Hollywood starlets will do... All the wars and conflicts of history might turn out to be but a pale prelude for the real struggle ahead of us: the struggle for eternal youth.”

from Homo Deus

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“people need stories in order to cooperate, and they can change the way they cooperate by changing the stories they believe. That why we're far more powerful than ants. That's our superpower.”

from Unstoppable Us (2022)

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“Why does all the bad stuff taste so good? Our bodies think we're still living in the Stone Age, and back then it made perfect sense to binge on sweet and fatty food.”

from Unstoppable Us (2022)

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“Gatherers usually ate better, more varied food than many modern factory workers, and they suffered less from starvation and disease... they were quite strong and healthy because they ate a lot of different things.”

from Unstoppable Us (2022)

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“We don't usually spend a lot of time thinking about needles, but they were one of the most important inventions in history. If ancient Sapiens hadn't invented needles, they probably couldn't have reached America.”

from Unstoppable Us (2022)

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“small changes nobody notices accumulate over time and become big changes... That's how you grow up, that's how a small land animal became a huge whale, and that's how hunting a few mammoths every year caused the mammoths to die out.”

from Unstoppable Us (2022)

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“if you invent a good story that enough people believe, you can conquer the world.”

from Unstoppable Us (2022)

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“Africans were more adapted to tropical climates than Europeans and that's why they ended up as slaves to European masters... It made way more sense for a plantation owner to invest in an immunized African slave than a European slave who might soon die.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“The only way to change an existing imagined order is to substitute it with another imagined order.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“There are twin pillars to every large-scale human order—mythology and... bureaucracy. It’s the same with kingdoms, empires and even modern states. They’re all based on myths.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Humans invented a whole bunch f stuff. Gods, nations, money, you name it. But take a closer look… and it’s the exact same thing again and again—unfair hierarchies”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“EVERY society is based on imagined hierarchies… fictional stories determine who gets which opportunities.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Evolution has no master plan. The functions performed by organs are constantly changing and the way they evolve doesn’t follow any predetermined path”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“In the last few decades we’ve invented countless tools that are meant to save time… but in spite of all that, I’m constantly rushed off my feet”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“All humans live inside the dreams of dead people… born into a world shaped by the myths of their ancestors, none of them ever really breaks free”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Stories are just tools we create to help people… if they do more harm than good, we should change them.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Free association and holistic thought have given way to compartmentalization and bureaucracy.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Large scale warfare isn’t a universal human characteristic. It was invented… then it spread like the plague”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Switching from mother’s milk to goat’s milk and gruel weakened your children’s immune systems… we wanted to create the perfect place for humans but we accidentally created the perfect place for germs”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“History was made by very few people while everyone else plowed fields and carried water buckets.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“We all believe in some kind of imagined order. Not because it’s objectively true—nuh-uh! It’s just that believing in it helps us cooperate and keep society in better shape.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Unlike ants, humans have no instinct for mass cooperation... There wasn't time for a new instinct for mass cooperation to evolve”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“Romanticism tells us that to live life to the fullest, we need more feelings and more experiences. So romanticism and consumerism are perfect bedfellows.”

from Sapiens, A Graphic History Vol. 2

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“The British killed, injured and persecuted the inhabitants of the subcontinent, but they also united a bewildering mosaic of warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a shared national consciousness... the modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire.”

from Sapiens

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“The monotheistic religions expelled the gods through the front door with a lot of fanfare, only to take them back in through the side window. Christianity, for example, developed its own pantheon of saints, whose cults differed little from those of the polytheistic gods.”

from Sapiens

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“Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists... Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition. It worked... Today most people outside East Asia adhere to one monotheist religion or another”

from Sapiens

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“The transition from many small cultures to a few large cultures and finally to a single global society was probably an inevitable result of the dynamics of human history.”

from Sapiens

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“Every point in history is a crossroads. A single traveled road leads from the past to the present, but myriad paths fork off into the future.”

from Sapiens

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“Our liberal political and judicial systems are founded on the belief that every individual has a sacred inner nature, indivisible and immutable... Yet over the last 200 years, the life science have thoroughly undermined this belief.”

from Sapiens

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“Our judicial and political systems largely try to sweep such inconvenient discoveries [science undermining beliefs in an indivisible, immutable self] under the carpet. But how long can we maintain the wall separating the department of biology from the departments of law and political science?”

from Sapiens

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“We are on the threshold of both heaven and hell, moving nervously between the gateway of the one and the anteroom of the other... a string of coincidences might yet send us rolling in either direction.”

from Sapiens

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“Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms.”

from Sapiens

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“'Arms racing' is a patterns of behavior that spreads itself like a virus from one country to another, harming everyone.”

from Sapiens

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“St. Augustine knew perfectly well that if you asked people about it, most of them would prefer to have sex than pray to god... [ proving ] only that humankind is sinful by nature and easily seduced by Satan. From a Christian viewpoint, the vast majority of people are in more or less the same situation as heroin addicts.”

from Sapiens

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“Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed... Buddhism shares the basic insight of the biological approach to happiness, that happiness results from processes occurring withing one's body, not from events in the outside world... the real root of suffering is this never-ending and pointless pursuit of ephemeral feelings”

from Sapiens

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“We have been disturbing the ecological equilibrium of our planet in myriad new ways... evidence indicates that we are destroying the foundations of human prosperity in an orgy of reckless consumption.”

from Sapiens

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“If we accept a mere tenth of what animal-rights activists are claiming, then modern industrial agriculture might well be the greatest crime in history.”

from Sapiens

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“When evaluating global happiness, it is wrong to count the happiness only of the upper classes, of Europeans or of men. Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.”

from Sapiens

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“Every new invention just puts another mile between us and the Garden of Eden.”

from Sapiens

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