Sofia :) > Sofia's Quotes

“Instead of studying old traditions, emphasis is now placed on new observations and experiments.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Modern culture has nevertheless been willing to embrace ignorance to a much greater degree than has any previous culture. One of the things that has made it possible for modern social orders to hold together is the spread of an almost religious belief in technology and in the methods of scientific research, which have replaced to some extent the belief in absolute truths.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The connection forged between science and technology is so strong that today people tend to confuse the two. We often think that it is impossible to develop new technologies without scientific research, and that there is little point in research if it does not result in new technologies. In fact, the relationship between science and technology is a very recent phenomenon. Prior to 1500, science and technology were totally separate fields”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“A good historian can find precedent for everything. But an even better historian knows when these precedents are but curiosities that cloud the big picture.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Only in the fifteenth century – about 600 years after the invention of gunpowder – did cannons become a decisive factor on Afro-Asian battlefields.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Poverty, sickness, wars, famines, old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“To channel limited resources we must answer questions such as ‘What is more important?’ and ‘What is good?’ And these are not scientific questions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, scurvy is estimated to have claimed the lives of about 2 million sailors.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The Cook expedition laid the foundation for the British occupation of the south-western Pacific Ocean; for the conquest of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand; for the settlement of millions of Europeans in the new colonies; and for the extermination of their native cultures and most of their native populations.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In the century following the Cook expedition, the most fertile lands of Australia and New Zealand were taken from their previous inhabitants by European settlers. The native population dropped by up to 90 per cent and the survivors were subjected to a harsh regime of racial oppression.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“An even worse fate befell the natives of Tasmania. Having survived for 10,000 years in splendid isolation, they were almost exterminated within a century of Cook’s arrival. European settlers first drove them off the richest parts of the island, and then, coveting even the remaining wilderness, hunted them down and killed them systematically”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In 1775 Asia accounted for 80 per cent of the world economy. The combined economies of India and China alone represented two-thirds of global production. In comparison, Europe was an economic dwarf.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900 Europeans firmly controlled the world’s economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the United States together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China’s portion had been reduced to 5 per”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Today all humans are, to a much greater extent than they usually want to admit, European in dress, thought and taste. They may be fiercely anti-European in their rhetoric, but almost everyone on the planet views politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes, and listens to music written in European modes with words in European languages. Even today’s burgeoning Chinese economy, which may soon regain its global primacy, is built on a European model of production and finance.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Why did the military–industrial–scientific complex blossom in Europe rather than India? When Britain leaped forward, why were France, Germany and the United States quick to follow, whereas China lagged behind?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“European imperialism was entirely unlike all other imperial projects in history. Previous seekers of empire tended to assume that they already understood the world. Conquest merely utilised and spread their view of the world.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“James Cook was not the first explorer to think this way. The Portuguese and Spanish voyagers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries already did. Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama explored the coasts of Africa and, while doing so, seized control of islands and harbours. Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ America and immediately claimed sovereignty over the new lands for the kings of Spain. Ferdinand Magellan found a way around the world, and simultaneously laid the foundation for the Spanish conquest of the Philippines.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The discovery of America was the foundational event of the Scientific Revolution. It not only taught Europeans to favour present observations over past traditions, but the desire to conquer America also obliged Europeans to search for new knowledge at breakneck speed. If they really wanted to control the vast new territories, they had to gather enormous amounts of new data about the geography, climate, flora, fauna, languages, cultures and history of the new continent. Christian Scriptures, old geography books and ancient oral traditions were of little help.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The European imperial expeditions transformed the history of the world: from being a series of histories of isolated peoples and cultures, it became the history of a single integrated human society.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Around 1517, Spanish colonists in the Caribbean islands began to hear vague rumours about a powerful empire somewhere in the centre of the Mexican mainland. A mere four years later, the Aztec capital was a smouldering ruin, the Aztec Empire was a thing of the past, and Hernán Cortés lorded over a vast new Spanish Empire in Mexico. The Spaniards did not stop to congratulate themselves or even to catch their breath. They immediately commenced explore-and-conquer operations in all directions.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“the profits of one particular bakery might rise, but only at the expense of the bakery next door. Venice might flourish, but only by impoverishing Genoa. The king of England might enrich himself, but only by robbing the king of France. You could cut the pie in many different ways, but it never got any bigger. That’s why many cultures concluded that making bundles of money was sinful. As Jesus said, ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19:24). If the pie is static, and I have a big part of it, then I must have taken somebody else’s slice.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Then came the Scientific Revolution and the idea of progress. The idea of progress is built on the notion that if we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. This idea was soon translated into economic terms.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The more profits he has, the more assistants he can employ. It follows that an increase in the profits of private entrepreneurs is the basis for the increase in collective wealth and prosperity. This may not strike you as very original, because we all live in a capitalist world that takes Smith’s argument for granted. We hear variations on this theme every day in the news. Yet Smith’s claim that the selfish human urge to increase private profits is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary ideas in human history – revolutionary not just from an economic perspective, but even more so from a moral and political perspective. What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The profits of production must be reinvested in increasing production.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In such ways did the king of Spain squander the trust of investors at the same time that Dutch merchants gained their confidence. And it was the Dutch merchants – not the Dutch state – who built the Dutch Empire. The king of Spain kept on trying to finance and maintain his conquests by raising unpopular taxes from a disgruntled populace. The Dutch merchants financed conquest by getting loans, and increasingly also by selling shares in their companies that entitled their holders to receive a portion of the company’s profits.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The Mississippi Bubble was one of history’s most spectacular financial crashes. The royal French financial system never recuperated fully”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“Like the Dutch Empire before it, the British Empire was established and run largely by private joint-stock companies based in the London stock exchange.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In 1784 a carriage service with a published schedule began operating in Britain. Its timetable specified only the hour of departure, not arrival. Back then, each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London time by up to half an hour. When it was 12:00 in London, it was perhaps 12:20 in Liverpool and 11:50 in Canterbury. Since there were no telephones, no radio or television, and no fast trains – who could know, and who cared?”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time, rather than the local times of Liverpool, Manchester or Glasgow.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind