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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.