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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.