Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana-republic dictator.

(scientists had no desire to open up the Pandora’s box of racism by claiming significant genetic diversity among modern human populations).

Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark.

Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.

Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.

It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.

‘The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.’ This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them.

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.

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

If there’s any truth in these stereotypes, then women should have made excellent politicians and empire-builders, leaving the dirty work on the battlefields to testosterone-charged but simple-minded machos.

Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off.

People rely on money to facilitate cooperation with strangers, but they’re afraid it will corrupt human values and intimate relations.

As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.