Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

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.

So ‘unalienable rights’ should be translated into ‘mutable characteristics’.

People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.

The same sort of multitasking applies to our sexual organs and behaviour. Sex first evolved for procreation and courtship rituals as a way of sizing up the fitness of a potential mate. But many animals now put both to use for a multitude of social purposes that have little to do with creating little copies of themselves. Chimpanzees, for example, use sex to cement political alliances, establish intimacy and defuse tensions. Is that unnatural?

omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.

To describe ‘how’ means to reconstruct the series of specific events that led from one point to another. To explain ‘why’ means to find causal connections that account for the occurrence of this particular series of events to the exclusion of all others.

Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage