Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

We assume that a large brain, the use of tools, superior learning abilities and complex social structures are huge advantages.

Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.

Rumour-mongers are the original fourth estate,

Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

This environment gives us more material resources and longer lives than those enjoyed by any previous generation, but it often makes us feel alienated, depressed and pressured.

You could survive and pass your unremarkable genes to the next generation by working as a water carrier or an assembly-line worker.

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.

These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

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

We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed and made our days more anxious and agitated.

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

Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism. Their marriage has given birth to the infinite ‘market of experiences’, on which the modern tourism industry is founded.

Many of history’s most important drivers are inter-subjective: law, money, gods, nations.

When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

Writing was born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master.

They thereby created artificial instincts that enabled millions of strangers to cooperate effectively. This network of artificial instincts is called ‘culture’.

Consistency is the playground of dull minds.

All human cultures are at least in part the legacy of empires and imperial civilisations, and no academic or political surgery can cut out the imperial legacies without killing the patient.

History cannot be explained deterministically and it cannot be predicted because it is chaotic.

Revolutions are, by definition, unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.

First, an individual might be ignorant of something important. To obtain the necessary knowledge, all he needed to do was ask somebody wiser.

One day as they were training, the astronauts came across an old Native American. The man asked them what they were doing there. They replied that they were part of a research expedition that would shortly travel to explore the moon. When the old man heard that, he fell silent for a few moments, and then asked the astronauts if they could do him a favour. ‘What do you want?’ they asked. ‘Well,’ said the old man, ‘the people of my tribe believe that holy spirits live on the moon. I was wondering if you could pass an important message to them from my people.’ ‘What’s the message?’ asked the astronauts. The man uttered something in his tribal language, and then asked the astronauts to repeat it again and again until they had memorised it correctly. ‘What does it mean?’ asked the astronauts. ‘Oh, I cannot tell you. It’s a secret that only our tribe and the moon spirits are allowed to know.’ When they returned to their base, the astronauts searched and searched until they found someone who could speak the tribal language, and asked him to translate the secret message. When they repeated what they had memorised, the translator started to laugh uproariously. When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully said, ‘Don’t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.’

‘The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.’

Traditional agricultural societies lived in the awful shade of starvation.

Obesity is a double victory for consumerism.

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.

They, too, are defined above all by what they consume.

For real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war.

There has never been real peace in the world.

It is sobering to realise how often our view of the past is distorted by events of the last few years.

A lot of evidence indicates that we are destroying the foundations of human prosperity in an orgy of reckless consumption.

Perhaps it is also wrong to consider only the happiness of humans.

As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how.