Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Unlike lying, an imagined reality is something that everyone believes in, and as long as this communal belief persists, the imagined reality exerts force in the world.

This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.

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

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

You also educate people thoroughly. From the moment they are born, you constantly remind them of the principles of the imagined order, which are incorporated into anything and everything.

Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can.

A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’

scholars usually distinguish between ‘sex’, which is a biological category, and ‘gender’, a cultural category.

‘You do not waste good iron to make nails,’

But these break-ups are temporary reversals in an inexorable trend towards unity.