Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

by Yuval Noah Harari

In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity?

Whereas the rich residents of Beverly Hills eat lettuce salad and steamed tofu with quinoa, in the slums and ghettos the poor gorge on Twinkie cakes, Cheetos, hamburgers and pizza.

The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.

Max Planck famously said that science advances one funeral at a time. He meant that only when one generation passes away do new theories have a chance to root out old ones.

We don’t become satisfied by leading a peaceful and prosperous existence. Rather, we become satisfied when reality matches our expectations.

that happiness is nothing but pleasure and freedom from pain, and that beyond pleasure and pain there is no good and no evil.

We never react to events in the outside world, but only to sensations in our own bodies.

For countless generations our biochemical system adapted to increasing our chances of survival and reproduction, not our happiness.

People drink alcohol to forget, they smoke pot to feel peaceful, they take cocaine and methamphetamines to be sharp and confident, whereas Ecstasy provides ecstatic sensations and LSD sends you to meet Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

what she fears most about growing old is becoming irrelevant, turning into a nostalgic old woman who cannot understand the world around her, or contribute much to it.

Medicine almost always begins by saving people from falling below the norm, but the same tools and know-how can then be used to surpass the norm.

you start with a flawed ideal, you often appreciate its defects only when the ideal is close to realisation.

But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.

Evolution also imprinted them with the assumption that emotional bonds are more likely to be formed with soft furry things than with hard and metallic objects.

Evolution means change, and is incapable of producing everlasting entities.

A beehive has much greater power than an individual butterfly, yet that doesn’t imply a bee is therefore more hallowed than a butterfly.

Corporations, money and nations exist only in our imagination. We invented them to serve us; why do we find ourselves sacrificing our lives in their service?

It is often said that God helps those who help themselves. This is a roundabout way of saying that God doesn’t exist, but if our belief in Him inspires us to do something ourselves – it helps.

Most natural systems exist in equilibrium, and most survival struggles are a zero-sum game in which one can prosper only at the expense of another.

Raw materials and energy are exhaustible – the more you use, the less you have. Knowledge, in contrast, is a growing resource – the more you use, the more you have.

Humanism has taught us that something can be bad only if it causes somebody to feel bad.

In a free market the customer is always right.

I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly.

Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

People usually compare themselves to their more fortunate contemporaries rather than to their ill-fated ancestors.