Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

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

There is no chance that gravity will cease to function tomorrow, even if people stop believing in it. In contrast, an imagined order is always in danger of collapse, because it depends upon myths, and myths vanish once people stop believing in them.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural.

‘Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs’ turned out in practice into ‘everyone would work as little as they can get away with, and receive as much as they could grab’.

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.