Academics from Israel

"All these cries for peace we hear in Israel, especially from our side, do not bring peace any closer -- they only push it away. If you chase peace it only eludes you. That's not game theory; that's history."

"We can trust only ourselves. The president of the United States has to look out for U.S. interests -- that is what he was elected to do. He does not have to look out for Israel's interests, nor do I expect him to. The bottom line is that Obama is president of the United States -- not the world -- so when it comes to Israel's interests I trust the prime minister's discretion."

"The world aligns itself with those who are strong, even if they are the embodiment of evil. That is why [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's insistence on addressing Congress in an effort to prevent a deal between the United States and Iran is vital..."

"Capitulation, sycophancy, and cowardice will only undermine us... Sometimes, you have to courageously follow your own path and not try to curry favor with anyone."

"It turns out that the Romans were champs in making peace. Their motto was that if you want to make peace, you need to prepare for war. They knew game theory."

"The strong equilibrium point f just described is one of "unrelenting ferocity" against offenders. It exhibits a zeal for meting out justice that is entirely oblivious to the sometimes dire consequences to oneself or to the other faitheful——i.e., those who have not deviated."

""Interactive Decision Theory" would perhaps be a more descriptive name for the discipline usually called Game Theory."

"I think game theory creates ideas that are important in solving and approaching conflict in general."

"“Torah study is an intellectual pursuit, and honoring this ultimate value transfers to other pursuits as well, Jewish homes are full of books while other homes may or may not be. Jewish homes have overflowing bookshelves. Throughout the generations we have given great honor to this intellectual pursuit…Torah study makes the nation and its people of the finest and highest quality.”"

"I would like to suggest that we should perhaps change direction in our efforts to bring about world peace. Up to now all the effort has been put into resolving specific conflicts: India–Pakistan, North–South Ireland, various African wars, Balkan wars, Russia–Chechnya, Israel–Arab, etc., etc. I’d like to suggest that we should shift emphasis and study war in general."

"War has been with us ever since the dawn of civilization. Nothing has been more constant in history than war."

"A person’s behavior is rational if it is in his best interests, given his information."

"The theory of repeated games is able to account for phenomena such as altruism, cooperation, trust, loyalty, revenge, threats (self-destructive or otherwise) – phenomena that may at first seem irrational – in terms of the “selfish” utility-maximizing paradigm of game theory and neoclassical economics."

"The players in a game are said to be in strategic equilibrium (or simply equilibrium) when their play is mutually optimal: when the actions and plans of each player are rational in the given strategic environment – i.e., when each knows the actions and plans of the others."

"Repetition acts as an enforcement mechanism: It makes cooperation achievable when it is not achievable in the one-shot game, even when one replaces strategic equilibrium as the criterion for achievability by the more stringent requirement of perfect equilibrium."

"In many real-world situations, cooperation may be easier to sustain in a long-term relationship than in a single encounter. Analyses of short-run games are, thus, often too restrictive. Robert Aumann was the first to conduct a full-fledged formal analysis of so-called infinitely repeated games. His research identified exactly what outcomes can be upheld over time in long-run relations."

"He advised the audience to remember the Romans, and the fact that as "disagreeable" as they were, the Roman Empire ruled in peace for 400 years."

"We won’t be moving people, we will be moving the borders. It’s not a transfer."

"The vision I would like to see here is the entrenching of the Jewish and the Zionist state. I very much favor democracy, but when there is a contradiction between democratic and Jewish values, the Jewish and Zionist values are more important."

"People can choose between the sweet lie or the bitter truth. I say the bitter truth, but many people don't want to hear it."

"There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone has a connection to Hamas. Everyone receives a salary from Hamas. Those who are trying to challenge us at the border and breach it belong to Hamas’s military wing."

"The Gaza sniper deserves a decoration, and the photographer a demerit."

"Whoever votes for Lieberman gives strength to Israel."

"The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazis for very specific reasons. They saw in the Jews the ultimate enemy, who was behind all the other enemies they had. And the Jews were in their eyes Satan; coming from a Christian background, although anti-Christian, if somebody was Satan you knew what to do with him. Murder him. Kill him. Annihilate him. Ultimately. Perhaps drive him out first. And then finally when this didn't work kill him. And it wasn't really directed against the Jews of country X but against the concept of the Jew. The Jew. Anywhere. Everywhere. At all times. Forever. And that is unique. That has never happened before but it can happen again. The idea of some powerful force that unless it is totally annihilated there's no chance for your survival. That was the Nazi ideology."

"Thou shall not be a perpetrator, thou shall not be a victim, and thou shall never, but never, be a bystander."

"In the book of which I have spoken before, are the Ten Commandments. Maybe we should add three additional ones: "You, your children and your children's children shall never become perpetrators"; "You, your children and your children's children shall never never allow yourselves to become victims"; and "You, your children and your children's children shall never, but never, be passive onlookers to mass murder, genocide, or (let us hope it may never be repeated) to a Holocaust-like tragedy.""

"the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty enacted in by the Knesset in 1992, to anchor in a Basic Law the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state two strands – the Jewish heritage and the democratic tradition... and it is the task of the courts to interweave them into the synthesis indicated by the Basic Law"

"The body of the legal system needs a soul and sometimes even an additional soul"

"[W]ithout an agreement imposed from the outside, our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam, to a war in constant escalation without the prospect of ultimate resolution."

""Security" is a reality only where there is true peace between neighbors, as in the case of Holland/Belgium, Sweden/Norway, the United States/Canada. In the absence of peace there is no security, and no geographic-strategic settlement on the land can change this. There is no direct link between security and the territories."

"Our security has been diminished rather than enhanced as a result of the conquests in this war."

"Our real problem is not the territory but rather the population of about a million and a half Arabs who live in it and over whom we will need to impose our rule. Inclusion of these Arabs (in addition to the half a million who are citizens of the state) in the area under our rule will effect the liquidation of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and bring about catastrophe for the Jewish people as a whole; it will undermine the social structure that we have created in the state and cause the corruption of individuals, both Jew and Arab."

"Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions. After a few years there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers. The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs."

"As for the "religious" arguments for the annexation of the territories—these are only an expression, subconsciously or perhaps even overtly hypocritical, of the transformation of the Jewish religion into a camouflage for Israeli nationalism. Counterfeit religion identifies national interests with the service of God and imputes to the state—which is only an instrument serving human needs—supreme value from a religious standpoint."

"Not every "return to Zion" is a religiously significant achievement: one sort of return which may be described in the words of the prophet: "When you returned you defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination" (Jeremiah 2:7)."

"Most characteristic of the Halakhah is its lack of pathos."

"Only a religion addressed to life's prose, a religion of the dull routine of daily activity, is worthy of the name."

"The religion of halakhic practice is the religion of life itself."

"The formulation "ways to faith" could be interpreted as implying that faith is a conclusion a person may come to after pondering certain facts about the world-facts about history, nature, or consciousness. If that were the case, one could lead a person to this conclusion by presenting these facts to him and pointing out their implications. I, however, do not regard religious faith as a conclusion. It is rather an evaluative decision that one makes, and, like all evaluations, it does not result from any information one has acquired, but is a commitment to which one binds himself. In other words, faith is not a form of cognition; it is a conative element of consciousness."

"From a religious point of view the triadic classification of being as nature, spirit, and God has no validity. There is only the dyad: nature, which includes the human spirit, and God. The only way man can break the bonds of nature is by cleaving to God; by acting in compliance with the divine will rather than in accordance with the human will."

"The essence of Jewish faith is consistent with no embodiment other than the system of halakhic praxis."

"Only the prayer which one prays as the observance of a Mitzvah is religiously significant. The spontaneous prayer ("when he is overwhelmed and pours out his complaint before God") a man prays of his own accord is, of course, halakhically permissible, but, like the performance of any act which has not been prescribed, its religious value is limited. As a religious act it is even faulty, since he who prays to satisfy his needs sets himself up as an end, as though God were a means for promotion of his welfare."

"Emancipation from the bondage of nature can only be brought about by the religion of Mitzvoth"

"Leibowitz regarded Judaism as a religious and historical phenomenon, which is characterized by a recognition of the duty to serve God in performing mitzvot. The service of God according to binding halakhic norms must be "for its own sake" (li-shemah), and its purpose is not designed to achieve personal perfection or to improve society. Religion is thus not a means toward any specific end. Judaism is for Leibowitz not humanism, or a sentiment or a bundle of memories. Jews have the obligation to take upon themselves the yoke of Torah and mitzvot. Leibowitz's standpoint is thus neither anthropocentric or ethnocentric, but theocentric."

"Leibowitz had a very negative view of Christianity as well as of modern Jewish thinkers like Rosenzweig and Buber, who showed intellectual and religious interest in Christianity. In contrast to scholars and thinkers like David Flusser, who investigated the Jewish roots of Christianity, Leibowitz wrote that the very concept of a "Judeo-Christian heritage" is a square circle. A synthesis or symbiosis is impossible; Christianity is for Leibowitz the adversary of Judaism. In his view, Christianity is the heir who does not want to admit that the testator is still alive. Judaism and Christianity cannot coexist, because Christianity claims that it is true Judaism, and is interested in the liquidation of Judaism as the religion of Torah and mitzvot."

"In his essays, Leibowitz produced sharp and thought-provoking insights on many subjects such as the nature of holiness, chosenness, Messianism, prayer, redemption, and general and personal providence. His consistent and provocative thought gave him a prominent position in contemporary Jewish thought, especially in Israel. His thinking, even when contested, is stimulating and powerful and invites or even forces people to respond by formulating their own views."

"On the one hand he was a libertarian, an extreme form of classical liberalism, and believed that human beings should be free to determine their way of life without any state interference. On the other hand, he was an ultra-Orthodox Jew who insisted that the state and religion must be separated completely to avoid corrupting each other."

"Leibowitz argued vehemently for two positions: that holding any state as a value in itself was inherently fascist and that sanctifying any piece of land, including Israel, was a form of idolatry. Very soon after the Six-Day War, Leibowitz predicted that if Israel didn't withdraw immediately from the occupied territories, all of the state's energy would be tied up in ruling another people against its will."

"The theme of this book is encapsulated in its portrayal of one of my heroes—or, I should say, my newest hero, since I had no knowledge of him before reading Blumenthal's work: his name is Yeshayahu Leibowitz. The Israeli polymath, who fled Germany in 1933 and emigrated to Palestine where he taught brain physiology at Tel Aviv University, starting teaching philosophy at the age of 72 (!), was an Orthodox Jewish scholar who edited the Encyclopedia Hebraica—and a hardcore libertarian only a little less radical than Murray Rothbard, whom he resembles in style and mannerisms to an amazing degree."

"It was strange to Leibowitz, who fled anti-Jewish persecution in Europe and emigrated to Israel to become one of the giants of the founding generation, because it inverted the whole history of the Jewish people, turning them into the spitting image of the pogromists whose terrorism he had fled."

"As the trends he abhorred gained ground in Israeli society Leibowitz's dark vision of Israel's future went pitch black."

"If AI can suffer, then it is an ethical subject and it needs protection, it needs rights, just like humans and animals."

"Intelligence is definitely not something that is directed towards amplifying happiness. I would also emphasize the huge, huge difference between intelligence and consciousness, which many people, certainly in the tech industry and in the AI industry, tend to miss."

"Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history… At first sight, domesticated animals may seem much better off than their wild cousins and ancestors. Wild buffaloes spend their days searching for food, water and shelter, and are constantly threatened by lions, parasites, floods and droughts. Domesticated cattle, by contrast, enjoy care and protection from humans. People provide cows and calves with food, water and shelter, they treat their diseases, and protect them from predators and natural disasters. True, most cows and calves sooner or later find themselves in the slaughterhouse. Yet does that make their fate any worse than that of wild buffaloes? Is it better to be devoured by a lion than slaughtered by a man? Are crocodile teeth kinder than steel blades?"

"Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen."

"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."

"Homo erectus, 'Upright Man,' [survived] for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever. This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species. It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league."

"When humans domesticated fire, they gained control of an obedient and potentially limitless force."

"Some human species may have made occasional use of fire as early as 800,000 years ago. By about 300,000 years ago, Homo erctus, Neanderthals and the forefathers of Homo sapiens were using fire on a daily basis."

"Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group."

"It may well be that when Sapines encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history."

"It (Gossip) comes so naturally to us that it seems as if our language evolved for the very purpose."

"In modern society, currency notes usually display religious images, revered ancestors and corporate totems."

"The Stone Age should be more accurately be called the Wood Age, because most of the tools used by the ancient hunter-gatherers were made of wood."

"The dog was the first animal domesticated by Homo sapiens, and this occurred before the Agricultural Revolution."

"Fishing villages might have appeared on the coasts of Indonesian islands as early as 45,000 years ago."

"Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well."

"Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domestic animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution."

"Animism is not a specific religion. It is a generic name for thousands of very different religions, cults and beliefs. What makes all of them 'animist' is this common approach to the world and man's place in it."

"Theism (from 'theos', 'god' in Greek) is the view that the universal order is based on a hierarchical relationship between humans and a small group of of eternal entities called gods."

"Planet Earth was separated into several ecosystems, each made up of a unique assembly of animals and plants. Homo sapiens was about to put an end to this biological exuberance."

"The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus' journey to America or Apollo 11 expedition to the moon."

"The moment the hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that the Homo sapiens to the top rung in the food chain, and became the deadliest species ever in the 4-billion-year history of life on earth."

"The settlers of Australia, or more accurately, its conquerors, didn't just adapt. They transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition."

"It's common... to explain... everything as the result of climate change, but... earth's climate... is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of... climate change. ...[O]ur planet has experienced numerous cycles of cooling and warming."

"The extinction of the Australian Megafauna was probably the first significant mark Homo sapiens left on our planet."

"No other animal [Homo sapiens] had ever moved into such a huge variety of habitats so quickly."

"At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about one hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet's big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or iron tools."

"The elephant bird and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1.500 years ago - precisely when the first humans set foot on the island."

"The Galápagos Islands... remained uninhabited by humans until the nine-teenth century.., preserving a unique menagerie..."

"Don't believe... that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record... for driving the most plant and animal species to... extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology."

"[H]umans sowed seeds, watered plants, plucked weeds from the ground and led sheep to prime pastures. This.., they thought, would provide... more fruit, grain and meat. It was... the Agricultural Revolution."

"Even today, with all our advanced technology, more than 90 per cent of the calories that feed humanity come from the handful of plants... our ancestors domesticated between 9500 and 3500 BC - wheat, rice, maize (called 'corn' in US), potatoes, millet and barley. No noteworthy plant and animal has been domesticated in the last 2000 years."

"The Agricultural Revolution... enlarged the... total... food.., but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. ...[I]t translated into population explosion and pampered elites."

"According to... evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth."

"Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometres of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain."

"[T]he new agricultural tasks demanded so much time... people were forced to settle permanently next to their wheat field. ...[W]heat... domesticated us."

"Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and... enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially."

"Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less would weaken their immune system, and permanent settlements would be hotbeds of infectious disease."

"One of history's few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally, they reach a point where they can't live without it."

"The structures at are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by s."

"In the conventional picture, pioneers first built a village, and when it prospered, they set up a temple... But suggests... the temple may have been built first..."

"The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever."

"The agricultural revolution is one of the most controversial events in history. Some... proclaim... it set humankind on the road to prosperity and progress. Others... that it has led to perdition."

"From the dawn of agriculture.., billions... armed with branches, swatters, shoes and poison sprays have waged... wars against diligent ants, furtive roaches, adventurous spiders and misguided beetles that constantly infiltrate the human domicile."

"[F]ood surpluses... with... transportation technology... enabled... more people to cram together... into large villages, then... towns, and finally... cities, all... joined... by new kingdoms and commercial networks."

"Yugoslavia in 1991 had more than enough... to feed all... and... disintegrated into a... bloodbath."

"The Roman Empire... collected taxes from up to 100 million subjects. This... financed... 250,000 - 500,000 soldiers, a road network still in use.., and theatres and amphitheatres that host spectacles to this day."

"This () was a collection of laws and judicial decisions whose aim was to present Hammurabi as a role model of a just king, serve as a basis for a more uniform legal system across the Babylonian Empire, and teach future generations what justice is and how a just king acts."

"According to the science of biology, people were not 'created'. They... evolved. And... not... to be 'equal'. ...Advocates of equality and human rights may be outraged by this... Their response is likely.., ‘...if we believe that we are all equal in essence, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.’ I have no argument with that. ...[B]elieving in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society."

"[W]hen... complex societies began to appear.., a... new type of information became vital ― numbers."

"[T]he first text of history contains no philosophical insight, no poetry, legends, laws, or... royal triumphs. They were humdrum economic documents, recording... taxes.., debts and... ownership of property."

"The earliest Sumerian writing was a partial... script. Full script is a system of material signs that can represent spoken language... everything people... say, including poetry. Partial script... can represent only particular... information... [in] a limited field of activity."

"Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues, dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied the internalised technique of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very different from those used by the brain."

"A critical step was made sometime before the ninth century AD, when a new partial script was invented, one that could store and process mathematical data with unprecedented efficiency. This partial script was composed of ten signs, representing the numbers from 0 - 9. Confusingly, these signs were known as even though they were first invented by the Hindus."

"Writing is born as the maidservant of human consciousness, but is increasingly becoming its master. Our computers have trouble understanding how Homo sapiens talks, feels and dreams. So we are teaching Homo sapiens to talk, feel and dream in the language of numbers, which can be understood by computers."

"According to a famous Hindu creation myth, the gods fashioned the world out of the body of a primeval being, the Purusa. The sun was created from Purusa's eyes, the moon from Purusa's brain, the Brahmins (priests) from the mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors) from its arms, the s (peasants and merchants) from its thighs, and Shudras (servants) from its legs."

"The ancient Chinese believed that the goddess Nü wa created humans from earth, she kneaded aristocrats from fine yellow soil, whereas commoners were formed from brown mud."

"American plantations in places such as Virginia, Haiti and Brazil were plunged by malaria and , which had originated in Africa. Africans had acquired over the generations a partial genetic immunity to these diseases."

"Paradoxically, genetic superiority (in terms of immunity) translated into social inferiority: precisely because Africans were fitter in tropical climates than Europeans!"

"[T]he burgeoning new society of America were to be divided into a ruling caste of white Europeans and a subjected class of black Africans."

"[E]ven though the slaves were freed, the racist myths that justified slavery persisted. Separation of race was maintained by racist legislation and social customs."

"In many societies women were simply the property... Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property violation... [i.e.,] the victim is not the woman... but the male who owns her. The Bible decrees... 'If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes... and lies with her, and they are found... the man... shall give... the father... fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife'... Deuteronomy 22:28-9... Raping a woman who did not belong to any man was not considered a crime..."

"To say that a husband 'raped' his wife was... illogical... As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife... in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997..."

"[T]he meaning of 'manhood' and 'womanhood' have varied... from one society to another... scholars usually distinguish... 'sex'... [as] biological... and 'gender'... cultural... Sex is divided between males and females, and the qualities... are objective and... constant... Gender is divided between... (...some cultures recognise other categories). ...'masculine' and 'feminine' qualities [which] are inter-subjective and undergo ...changes."

"At least since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchal societies that valued men more highly than women. ... Fewer resources are invested in the health and education of women; they have fewer economic opportunities, less political power, and less freedom of movement."

"Wars are not a pub brawl. ...[A]n aggressive brute is often the worst choice to run a war. Much better is a cooperative person who knows how to appease... and... see things from different perspectives. ...The militarily incompetent Augustus ...succeeded in ...achieving something that eluded ...Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great ...[H]istorians often attribute this ...to his ...clementia—mildness and clemency."

"Myths and fictions accustom... people... to think in certain ways, to believe in... certain standards, to want certain things, and to observe certain rules. ...[T]hereby ...artificial instincts ...enable millions of strangers to cooperate ...This network of artificial instinct is ...'Culture'."

"Unlike the laws of physics... every man-made order is packed with internal contradictions. Cultures are constantly trying to reconcile these contradictions, and this... fuels change."

"Anyone who has read... Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of life."

"Osama bin Laden, for all his hatred of American culture.., religion, and... politics, was... fond of American dollars. How did money succeed where gods and kings failed?"

"The followers of Christ and... Allah killed each other by the thousands, devastated fields and orchards, and turned prosperous cities into smouldering ruins..."

"Money is not coins and bank notes. Money is anything that people... use... to represent... value... for... exchanging goods and services."

"The... money in the world is about $60 trillion, yet... coins and bank notes is less than $6 trillion. More than 90% percent of all money... [>]$50 trillion... in our accounts... exists only on computer servers."

"Money... is most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised."

"Money is more open-minded than language, state law, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money... can bridge almost any cultural gap, and does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation."

"Most past cultures have... fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which... consigned them to oblivion. Empires... ultimately fall, but... tend to leave behind rich.., enduring legacies."

"In our time, 'imperialist' ranks second only to 'fascist' in the of political swear words."

"[E]mpire has been the world’s most common form of political organisation for... 2,500 years."

"Imperial elites used... profits of conquest to finance... armies and forts but also philosophy, art, justice and charity."

"Present-day speak Arabic, think of themselves as Arabs, and identify... with the Arab Empire that conquered Egypt in the seventh century and crushed... repeated revolts..."

"The first empire... was the of Sargon the Great..."

"[M]ost imperial elites... believed that they were working for the general welfare of... inhabitants. China's ruling class treated... neighbours and... foreign subjects as... barbarians to whom the empire must bring... culture. The was bestowed upon the emperor not... to exploit... but... to educate humanity."

"Muslim caliphs received a divine mandate to spread the Prophet's revelation, peacefully if possible... by the sword if necessary."

"Many Americans... maintain... a to bring the Third World countries... benefits of democracy and human rights, even if... by s and F-16s."

"[T]he modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire. The British killed, injured and persecuted... but... also united... warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a... national consciousness and a country that functioned... as a single political unit."

"[[Religion|[R]eligion]] has been the third great unifier... alongside money and empire."

"Religion can... be defined..[:] a system of human laws... founded on a belief in superhuman laws."

"[T]he majority of ancient religions were local and exclusive.., believed in local deties and spirits, and had no interest in converting the... human race."

"[U]niversal and missionary religions began to appear... in the first millennium BC.., one of the most important revolutions in history, and made a vital contribution to the unification of humankind, much like... universal empires and... money."

"For thousands of years after the Agricultural Revolution... consisted mainly of... sacrificing lambs, wine and cakes to divine powers... [for] promised abundant harvest and fecund flocks."

"These polytheistic] religions understood the world to be controlled by... powerful gods... Humans could appeal to these... to bring rain, victory... health."

"[M]onotheistic brainwashing... caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry."

"In Hindu polytheism, a single principle, Atman, controls the myriad gods and spirits, humankind, and the biological and physical world. Atman is the central essence or soul of the... universe.., of every individual and every phenomenon."

"The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic... evangelising god of the Christians."

"Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion."

"The religious wars between Catholics and Protestants that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are... notorious. ...[T]hey disagreed about the nature of... [Christ's] love."

"The first monotheist religion known... appeared in Egypt, c.1350 BC, when Pharaoh Akhenaten declared... one of the minor deties... ... supreme power ruling the universe."

"Judaism had little to offer other nations, and throughout most of its existence... [was] not... a missionary religion.., [but] a 'local monotheism"."

"Christians began... widespread missionary activities... In one of history's strangest twists, this esoteric Jewish sect took over the... Roman Empire."

"Christian success served as a model for... seventh century... Islam."

"Dualistic religions espouse... opposing powers: good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes... evil is an independent power, neither created by... nor subordinate to...[God].., that the... universe is a battleground.., that everything... is part of the struggle."

"Dualistic religions flourished for more than a thousand years. ...[B]etween 1500 BC and 1000 BC ...Zoroaster ...was active ...in Central Asia. His creed... became the most important of dualistic religions ...Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good... Ahura Mazda and the evil... Angra Mainyu."

"Gnostics and Manichaeans argued... the good god created the spirit and soul.., matter and bodies are... of the evil god. Man... serves as a battleground..."

"Gautama... attained nirvana... fully liberated from suffering. Henceforth... as 'Buddha'.., 'The Enlightened One'.., spent... his life explaining his discoveries... in a single law: ...to be ...liberated from suffering is to be ...liberated from craving; and the only way ...is to train the mind to experience reality as it is."

"The modern age has witnessed the rise of... new natural-law religions, such as liberalism, Communism, capitalism, nationalism and Nazism."

"Like Buddhism, Communists believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions."

"Today, the most important humanist sect is liberal humanism, which believes that 'humanity' is a quality of individual humans, and that the liberty of individuals is therefore sacrosanct."

"the Nazis believed that humankind is not something universal or eternal, but rather a mutable species that can evolve or degenerate. Man can evolve into superman, or can degenerate into subhuman."

"Nazis said that the Aryan race, the most advanced form of humanity, had to be protected and fostered, while degenerate kinds of Homo sapiens like Jews, Roma, homosexuals and the mentally ill had to be quarantined and even exterminated."

"According to Nazis, Homo sapiens had already divided into several races, the Aryan race, had the finest qualities ― rationalism, beauty, integrity, diligence... [and] the potential to turn... into superman. Other races... possessing inferior qualities... [i]f allowed to breed... with Aryans... would adulterate... and doom Homo sapiens to extinction."

"Biologists have... debunked Nazi racial theory. ...[G]enetic research... has demonstrated that... differences between... human lineages are far smaller..."

"Scientists... have found no soul... They... argue... human behaviour is determined by hormones, genes and synapses, rather than free will ― the... forces that determine... [[w:Animal behaviour|[animal] behaviour]]..."

"When Constantine assumed the throne in 306, Christianity was little more than an esoteric Eastern sect."

"Revolutions are, by definition unpredictable."

"[W]hy study history? ...[It] is not a means of making accurate predictions. We study history... to widen... horizons, to understand that our present... is... [not] inevitable, and that we... have many more possibilities before us..."

"[[Postmodernism|[P]ostmodernist thinkers]] describe nationalism as a deadly plague that spread... in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, causing wars, oppression, hate and genocide."

"For most of history, humans knew nothing about 99.99 per cent of the organisms on the planet... the s. ...Each of us bears billions... They are our best friends, and deadliest enemies. Some... digest our food and clean our guts.., others cause illness and epidemics."

"The Scientific Revolution... has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery... was... that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions."

"[T]he prophet Muhammad began... by condemning... fellow Arabs for living in ignorance of the divine truth. Yet Muhammad... argue[d] that he knew the full truth, and... followers began calling him 'the '."

"[W]illingness to admit ignorance... made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than... previous tradition[s]."

"Mere observations... are not knowledge. ...[T]o understand the universe, we need ...theories. Earlier traditions usually formulated... theories... [as] stories. Modern science uses mathematics."

"The greatness of Newton's theory was its ability to explain and predict the movement of all bodies... from falling apples to shooting stars, using three simple mathematical laws."

"Only around the end of the nineteenth century did scientists come across a few observations that did not fit... with Newton's laws, and these led to the next revolution... the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics."

"Throughout most of history, mathematics was an esoteric field that even educated people rarely studied seriously. In medieval Europe, logic, grammar and rhetoric formed the educational core... [M]athematics seldom went beyond simple arithmetic and geometry. ...The undisputed monarch of all science was theology."

"Today... there is an irresistible urge to study the exact sciences - defined... 'exact' by their... mathematical tools."

"Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad would have been bewildered if... told... that... to understand the... mind and cure its illness you must... study statistics."

"The most important military invention in the history of China was ... invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for the ."

"Only in the fifteenth century - almost 600 years after the invention of the gunpowder - did s become a decisive factor..."

"Until the Scentific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress... the golden age was... past,... the world... stagnant, if not deteriorating."

"Throughout history, societies have suffered from two kinds of poverty: social poverty... withholds from some... the opportunities available to others; and biological poverty... puts... life... at risk due to lack of food and shelter. Perhaps social poverty can never be eradicated, but in many countries... biological poverty is a thing of the past."

"Scientists... are not always aware of the political, economic and religious interests that control... money; many... act out of purely intellectual curiosity. ...[O]nly rarely do scientists dictate the scientific agenda."

"Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, ... claimed the lives of... [~]2 million sailors. No one knew what caused it..."

"For the aborigines of Australia, and to a lesser extent for the Maori of New Zealand, the Cook expedition was the beginning of a catastrophe from which they have never fully recovered."

"The Scientific Revolution and modern imperialism were inseparable."

"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."

"The global centre of power shifted to Europe only between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans... in a series of wars... conquered large parts of Asia."

"Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way... before they enjoyed... technological advantage."

"The Far East and the Islamic world... between 1500 and 1950... did not produce anything... close to Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology."

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, almost every important military expedition that left Europe... had on board scientists who set out... to... make scientific discoveries."

"When Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, he took 165 scholars.... Among other things, they founded... , and made... contributions to the study of religion, linguistics and botany."

"The European imperial expeditions transformed... history... from... isolated peoples and cultures... [to] the history of a single integrated human society."

"Columbus's fleet... of three small ships manned by 120 sailors... was like a trio of mosquitoes compared to Zheng He's drove of dragons."

"For modern Europeans, building an empire was a scientific project..."

"[T]he Great Survey of India... lasted sixty years. ...[T]he British ...mapped the whole of India, marking borders... and calculating... the... height of Mount Everest and other Himalayan peaks."

"Money has been essential both for building empires and for promoting science. Neither modern armies nor university laboratories can be sustained without banks."

"[T]o understand modern economic history, you need to understand... a single word... growth."

"Smith's claim that the selfish human urge... is the basis for collective wealth is one of the most revolutionary.., not just from an economic... but... more so from a moral and political perspective. ...Smith says.., greed is good, and... by becoming richer I benefit everybody... is altruism."

"Capitalism distinguishes 'capital' from mere 'wealth'. Capital consists of... resources... invested in production. Wealth... is buried... or wasted on unproductive activities."

"Napoleon... [called the British] a nation of shopkeepers. Yet these shopkeepers defeated Napoleon... and their empire was the largest the world has ever seen."

"In the late nineteenth century... [~]40 million Chinese, a tenth of the... population, were addicts."

"In the Middle Ages, was a rare luxury in Europe. It was imported from the Middle East at prohibitive prices and used sparingly..."

"The annual sugar intake of the average Englishman rose from near zero in the early seventeenth century to around eight kilograms in the early nineteenth century."

"From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.., [~]10 million African slaves were imported to America. ...[~]70 per cent... worked on the s."

"Christianity and Nazism, have killed millions out of burning hatred. Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed."

"For decades was much more expensive than gold. ...Napoleon III... commissioned cutlery... for... distinguished guests. Less important visitors had to make do with the gold..."

"Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more... as a... positive... It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves.., even kill themselves slowly by ."

"Religious holidays... have become shopping festivals."

"Obesity is a double victory... [E]ating little... will lead to economic contraction... [E]at too much and... buy diet products - contributing to economic growth twice over."

"The capitalist and consumerist ethics are... a merger of commandments. The... rich... 'Invest!' The... rest... 'Buy!'"

"Our... green and blue planet is becoming... concrete and plastic..."

"The Industrial Revolution turned the time table and the assembly line into a template... [S]chools... adopted... timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores. ...[I]n places devoid of assembly lines and machines, the timetable became king."

"The first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830."

"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 and Glasgow."

"Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles."

"Throughout most of history, women were often seen as the property of family or community. Modern states, on the other hand, see women as individuals, enjoying ecconimic and legal rights independently of their family and community."

"Consumerism and nationalism... make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community.., that we... have a common past.., interest and... future. This isn't a lie. It's imagination."

"As long as millions of Germans believe in... a German nation, get excited at... national symbols, retell... national myths, and... sacrifice money, time and limbs for the... nation, Germany will remain one of the strongest powers..."

"California['s] wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is... and ― Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood."

"Ours is the first time in history that the world is dominated by a peace-loving elite - politicians, business people, intellectuals and artists who genuinely see war as both evil and avoidable."

"International wars became rare only after 1945, largely thanks to the new threat of nuclear annihilation."

"For 2500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and cause of happiness. which is why there is a growing interest among the scientific community both in their philosophy and their meditation practices."

"Scholars began to study the history of happiness only a few years ago, and we are still formulating initial hypotheses and searching for appropriate research methods."

"In laboratories throughout the world, scientists are engineering living beings. They break the laws of natural selection with impunity, unbridled even by an organism's original characteristics."

"[I]f humankind doesn’t annihilate itself... the Scientific Revolution... may turn out to be the most important bological revolution..."

"There is nothing new about biological engineering per se. People have been using it for millennia..."

"Scientists believe that we will soon have bionic arms that will... be able to transmit signals back to the brain... enabling... the sense of touch."

"The era of personalised medicine... that matches treatment to DNA... has begun."

"[T]he Frankenstein story appears to warn... that if we try to... engineer life we will be punished..."

"When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination... everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people will be living... on Mars and Pluto. ...[N]obody foresaw the Internet."

"Seventy thousand years ago, homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal... in... Africa. ...[I]t transformed... into the master of the... planet and... terror of the ecosystem.., on the verge of... eternal youth... [with] divine abilities of creation and destruction."

"[H]ow did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts..? ...[H]umans created imagined orders and devised scripts... The imagined orders sustaining... networks... divided people into [a] make-believe hierarchy. Superiors got... the good things... Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained."

"[F]or the vast majority of domesticated animals, the Agricultural Revolution was a terrible catastrophe."

"Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the... life of most humans ran... within three ancient frames: the nuclear family.., extended family and... local intimate community. ...The family was... the welfare.., health.., education system.., construction industry.., pension fund.., insurance company.., radio.., television.., newspapers.., bank and... police."

"Buddha’s recommendation was to stop... the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings."

"How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? ...[N]ever admit that the order is imagined."

"[F]rom a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has... no meaning... the outcome of blind evolutionary processes... without goal or purpose. Our actions are not part of... divine cosmic plan, and if planet earth were to blow up... the universe would... keep going... business as usual. ...[H]uman subjectivity would not be missed. ...[M]eaning ...people ascribe to their lives is... delusion."

"[P]erhaps happiness is synchronising... personal delusions.. with... prevailing collective delusions."

"Dualism... has a... simple answer to the... Problem of Evil... Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain... suffering... One... explanation.., [w]ere there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil.., hence... no free will. Dualisim... is unnerved by the Problem of Order. ...[I]f Good and Evil battle for control... who enforces the laws. [M]onotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. ...[S]olving the riddle: ...there is a single omnipotent God... and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such..."

"[T]he modern world fails to square liberty with equality."

"[[Contradiction|[C]ontradiction]]s are culture’s engines, responsible for... creativity and dynamism... Just as... clashing musical notes... force... music forward.., discord in... thoughts, ideas and values compel us to think, reevaluate and criticise. Consistency is the playground of dull minds."

"We have... increased food production, built cities, established empires and created... trade networks. But did we decrease... suffering..? ...[M]assive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals."

"[W]e have... made... progress... with the reduction of famine, plague and war. Yet the situation of other animals is deteriorating... and the improvement in... humanity is... fragile..."

"Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history."

"Today more than ninety per cent of all large animals are domesticated. Consider the chicken, for example. Ten thousand years ago it was a rare bird confined to small niches of South Asia. Today billions of chickens live on almost every continent and island, bar Antarctica. The domesticated chicken is probably the most widespread bird in the annals of planet Earth. If you measure success in terms of numbers, chickens, cows and pigs are the most successful animals ever. Alas, domesticated species paid for their unparalleled collective success with unprecedented individual suffering."

"The root of the problem is that domesticated animals have inherited from their wild ancestors many physical, emotional and social needs that are redundant in human farms. Farmers routinely ignore these needs without paying any economic price. They lock animals in tiny cages, mutilate their horns and tails, separate mothers from offspring, and selectively breed monstrosities."

"The fate of farm animals is not an ethical side issue. It concerns the majority of Earth's large creatures: tens of billions of sentient beings, each with a complex world of sensations and emotions, but who live and die as cogs in an industrial production line."

"As human soldiers and workers give way to algorithms, at least some elites may conclude that there is no point in providing improved or even standard levels of health for masses of useless poor people, and it is far more sensible to focus on upgrading a handful of superhumans beyond the norm."

"The coming technological bonanza will probably make it feasible to feed and support these useless masses even without any effort from their side. What will they do all day? One answer might be drugs and computer games. Unnecessary people might spend increasing amounts of time within 3D-virtual-reality worlds, that would provide them with far more excitement and emotional engagement than the drab reality outside. Yet such a development would deal a mortal blow to the liberal belief in the sacredness of human life and of human experiences. What's so sacred about useless bums who pass their time devouring artificial experiences in ?"

"In the twenty-first century, those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation and destruction, while those left behind will face extinction."

"In the twenty-first century we will create more powerful fictions and more totalitarian religions than in any previous era. With the help of biotechnology and computer algorithms these religions will not only control our minute-by-minute existence, but will be able to shape our bodies, brains and minds, and to create entire virtual worlds complete with hells and heavens."

"Doubts about the existence of free will and individuals are nothing new, of course. More than 2,000 years ago thinkers in India, China and Greece argued that ‘the individual self is an illusion’. Yet such doubts don’t really change history much unless they have a practical impact on economics, politics and day-to-day life. Humans are masters of cognitive dissonance, and we allow ourselves to believe one thing in the laboratory and an altogether different thing in the courthouse or in parliament. Just as Christianity didn’t disappear the day Darwin published On the Origin of Species, so liberalism won’t vanish just because scientists have reached the conclusion that there are no free individuals."

"In the past there were many things only humans could do. But now robots and computers are catching up, and may soon outperform humans in most tasks. True, computers function very differently from humans, and it seems unlikely that computers will become humanlike any time soon. In particular, it doesn’t seem that computers are about to gain consciousness and start experiencing emotions and sensations. Over the past half century there has been an immense advance in computer intelligence, but there has been exactly zero advance in computer consciousness. As far as we know, computers in 2016 are no more conscious than their prototypes in the 1950s. However, we are on the brink of a momentous revolution. Humans are in danger of losing their economic value because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness."

"Of course, by 2033 many new professions are likely to appear, for example, virtual-world designers. But such professions will probably require much more creativity and flexibility than current run-of-the-mill jobs, and it is unclear whether forty-year-old cashiers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if they do so, the pace of progress is such that within another decade they might have to reinvent themselves yet again. After all, algorithms might well outperform humans in designing virtual worlds too. The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms."

"...Suppose you have two free hours a week, and are uncertain whether to use them playing chess or tennis. A good friend might ask: 'What does your heart tell you?' 'Well,' you answer, 'as far as my heart is concerned, it’s obvious tennis is better. It’s also better for my cholesterol level and blood pressure. But my fMRI scans indicate I should strengthen my left pre-frontal cortex. In my family dementia is quite common, and my uncle had it at a very early age. The latest studies indicate that a weekly game of chess can help delay its onset.'"

"Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological change. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, they can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but not an Apple or a Wikipedia."

"...Meanwhile in the USA paranoid Republicans have accused Barack Obama of being a ruthless despot hatching conspiracies to destroy the foundations of American society – yet in eight years of his presidency he barely managed to pass a minor health-care reform."

"From a Dataist perspective, we may interpret the entire human species as a single data-processing system, with individual humans serving as its chips. If so, we can also understand the whole of history as a process of improving the efficiency of this system through four basic methods:"

": 1: Increasing the number of processors."

": 2: Increasing the variety of processors."

": 3: Increasing the number of connections between processors."

": 4: Increasing the freedom of movement along existing connections."

"Without criticising the liberal model, we cannot repair its faults or go beyond it. But please note that this book could have been written only when people are still relatively free to think what they like and to express themselves as they wish. If you value this book, you should also value the freedom of expression."

"In the beginning, the liberal story cared mainly about the liberties and privileges of middle-class European men, and seemed blind to the plight of working-class people, women, minorities and non-Westerners. When in 1918 victorious Britain and France talked excitedly about liberty, they were not thinking about the subjects of their worldwide empires."

"But liberalism has no obvious answers to the biggest problems we face: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Liberalism traditionally relied on economic growth to magically solve difficult social and political conflicts."

"The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures."

"As algorithms come to know us so well, authoritarian governments could gain absolute control over their citizens, even more so than in Nazi Germany, and resistance to such regimes might be utterly impossible. Not only will the regime know exactly how you feel – it could make you feel whatever it wants. The dictator might not be able to provide citizens with healthcare or equality, but he could make them love him and hate his opponents. Democracy in its present form cannot survive the merger of biotech and infotech. Either democracy will successfully reinvent itself in a radically new form, or humans will come to live in ‘digital dictatorships’."

"But in reality, there is no reason to assume that artificial intelligence will gain consciousness, because intelligence and consciousness are very different things. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems. Consciousness is the ability to feel things such as pain, joy, love and anger. We tend to confuse the two because in humans and other mammals intelligence goes hand in hand with consciousness. Mammals solve most problems by feeling things. Computers, however, solve problems in a very different way."

"The race to obtain the data is already on, headed by data-giants such as Google, Facebook, Baidu and Tencent. So far, many of these giants seem to have adopted the business model of ‘attention merchants’. They capture our attention by providing us with free information, services and entertainment, and they then resell our attention to advertisers. Yet the data-giants probably aim far higher than any previous attention merchant. Their true business isn’t to sell advertisements at all. Rather, by capturing our attention they manage to accumulate immense amounts of data about us, which is worth more than any advertising revenue. We aren’t their customers – we are their product."

"What will happen once we can ask Google, ‘Hi Google, based on everything you know about cars, and based on everything you know about me (including my needs, my habits, my views on global warming, and even my opinions about Middle Eastern politics) – what is the best car for me?’ If Google can give us a good answer to that, and if we learn by experience to trust Google’s wisdom instead of our own easily manipulated feelings, what could possibly be the use of car advertisements?"

"The so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions in the Arab world started in hopeful online communities, but once they emerged into the messy offline world, they were commandeered by religious fanatics and military juntas."

"In less than a hundred years the Germans organised themselves into six very different systems: the Hohenzollern Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic (aka communist East Germany), the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany), and finally democratic reunited Germany. Of course the Germans kept their language and their love of beer and bratwurst. But is there some unique German essence that distinguishes them from all other nations, and that has remained unchanged from Wilhelm II to Angela Merkel?"

"I cannot name the 8 million people who share my Israeli citizenship, I have never met most of them, and I am very unlikely ever to meet them in the future. My ability to nevertheless feel loyal to this nebulous mass is not a legacy from my hunter-gatherer ancestors, but a miracle of recent history."

"If Greeks and Germans cannot agree on a common destiny, and if 500 million affluent Europeans cannot absorb a few million impoverished refugees, what chances do humans have of overcoming the far deeper conflicts that beset our global civilisation?"

"Diabetes and high sugar levels kill up to 3.5 million people annually, while air pollution kills about 7 million people. So why do we fear terrorism more than sugar, and why do governments lose elections because of sporadic terror attacks but not because of chronic air pollution?"

"In the 1930s Japanese generals, admirals, economists and journalists concurred that without control of Korea, Manchuria and the Chinese coast, Japan was doomed to economic stagnation. They were all wrong. In fact, the famed Japanese economic miracle began only after Japan lost all its mainland conquests."

"When I think of the mystery of existence, I prefer to use other words, so as to avoid confusion. And unlike the God of the Islamic State and the Crusades – who cares a lot about names and above all about His most holy name – the mystery of existence doesn’t care an iota what names we apes give it."

"Not visiting any temples and not believing in any god is also a viable option. As the last few centuries have proved, we don’t need to invoke God’s name in order to live a moral life. Secularism can provide us with all the values we need."

"The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith. Seculars strive not to confuse truth with belief."

"I have participated in numerous private and public debates about gay marriage, and all too often some wise guy asks ‘If marriage between two men is OK, why not allow marriage between a man and a goat?’ From a secular perspective the answer is obvious. Healthy relationships require emotional, intellectual and even spiritual depth. A marriage lacking such depth will make you frustrated, lonely and psychologically stunted. Whereas two men can certainly satisfy the emotional, intellectual and spiritual needs of one another, a relationship with a goat cannot. Hence if you see marriage as an institution aimed at promoting human well-being – as secular people do – you would not dream of even raising such a bizarre question. Only people who see marriage as some kind of miraculous ritual might do so."

"One would have thought that conservatives would care far more about the conservation of the old ecological order, and about protecting their ancestral lands, forests and rivers. In contrast, progressives could be expected to be far more open to radical changes to the countryside, especially if the aim is to speed up progress and increase the human standard of living. However, once the party line has been set on these issues by various historical quirks, it has become second nature for conservatives to dismiss concerns about polluted rivers and disappearing birds, while left-wing progressives tend to fear any disruption to the old ecological order."

"Leaders are thus trapped in a double bind. If they stay in the centre of power, they will have an extremely distorted vision of the world. If they venture to the margins, they will waste too much of their precious time. And the problem will only get worse. In the coming decades, the world will become even more complex than it is today. Individual humans – whether pawns or kings – will consequently know even less about the technological gadgets, the economic currents, and the political dynamics that shape the world. As Socrates observed more than 2,000 years ago, the best we can do under such conditions is to acknowledge our own individual ignorance."

"Drinking lots of will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic – rather, it increases your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health and sports – and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage."

"In the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most important artistic genre is science fiction. Very few people read the latest articles in the fields of machine learning or genetic engineering. Instead, movies such as The Matrix and Her and TV series such as Westworld and Black Mirror shape how people understand the most important technological, social and economic developments of our time."

"In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it. Instead, people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world."

"Many pedagogical experts argue that schools should switch to teaching ‘the four Cs’ – critical thinking, communication, collaboration and creativity.3 More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things, and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations."

"So at twenty-five you introduce yourself on a dating site as ‘a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop’. At thirty-five you say you are ‘a gender-non-specific person undergoing age-adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before’."

"For years I lived under the impression that I was the master of my life, and the CEO of my own personal brand. But a few hours of meditation were enough to show me that I hardly had any control of myself. I was not the CEO – I was barely the gatekeeper. I was asked to stand at the gateway of my body – the nostrils – and just observe whatever comes in or goes out. Yet after a few moments I lost my focus and abandoned my post."

"The typical scientist doesn’t actually practise meditation herself. Rather, she invites experienced meditators to her laboratory, covers their heads with electrodes, asks them to meditate, and observes the resulting brain activities. That can teach us many interesting things about the brain, but if the aim is to understand the mind, we are missing some of the most important insights."

"If we are willing to make such efforts in order to understand foreign cultures, unknown species and distant planets, it might be worth working just as hard in order to understand our own minds. And we had better understand our minds before the algorithms make our minds up for us."

"Can you name a great work of art inspired by the Old Testament? Oh, that's easy: Michelangelo's David, Verdi's Nabucco, Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. Do you know of any famous work inspired by the New Testament? Piece of cake: Leonardo's Last Supper, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, Monty Python's Life of Brian. Now for the real test: can you list a few masterpieces inspired by the Talmud?Though Jewish communities that studied the Talmud spread over large parts of the world, they did not play an important role in the building of the Chinese empires, in the European voyages of discovery, in the establishment of the democratic system, or in the Industrial Revolution. The coin, the university, parliament, the bank, the compass, the printing press, and the steam engine were all invented by Gentiles."

"A lot of people sense that they are being left behind and left out of the story, even if their material conditions are still relatively good. In the 20th century, what was common to all the stories—the liberal, the fascist, the communist—is that the big heroes of the story were the common people. Not necessarily all people, but if you lived, say, in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, life was very grim. But when you looked at the propaganda posters on the walls that depicted the glorious future, you were there. You looked at the posters which showed steel workers and farmers in heroic poses, and it was obvious that this is the future. Now, when people look at the posters on the walls, or listen to TED talks, they hear a lot of, you know, these big ideas and big words about "machine learning" and "genetic engineering" and "blockchain" and "globalization", and they are not there. They are no longer part of the story of the future. And I think that—again, this is a hypothesis—if I try to understand and to connect to the deep resentment of people in many places around the world, part of what might be going on there is people realize—and they're correct in thinking that—that, "The future doesn't need me. You have all these smart people in California and in New York and in Beijing, and they are planning this amazing future with artificial intelligence and bio-engineering and global connectivity and whatnot, and they don't need me. So maybe if they are nice, they will throw some crumbs my way, like universal basic income." But it's much worse psychologically to feel that you are useless than to feel that you are exploited."

"Yuval Noah Harari: If you go back to the middle of the 20th century—and it doesn't matter if you're in the United States with Roosevelt, or if you're in Germany with Hitler, or even in the USSR with Stalin—and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers. You need them. You don't have any kind of future without them. And now, fast forward to the early 21st century, when we just don't need the vast majority of the population. Chris Anderson: Because? Yuval Noah Harari: Because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like, again, artificial intelligence, bioengineering. Most people don't contribute anything to that, except perhaps their data. And whatever people are still doing which is useful, these technologies increasingly will make redundant, and will make it possible to replace the people."

"Humans are organic beings who live by cyclical biological time. ... Even the money market respects these biological cycles. The New York Stock Exchange is open Monday to Friday, from 9:30 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon, and is closed on holidays like Independence Day and New Year’s Day. If a war erupts at 4:01 p.m. on a Friday, the market won’t react to it until Monday morning. In contrast, a network of computers can always be on. Computers are consequently pushing humans toward a new kind of existence in which we are always connected and always monitored. In some contexts, like health care, this could be a boon. In other contexts, like for citizens of totalitarian states, this could be a disaster. Even if the network is potentially benign, the very fact that it is always on might be damaging to organic entities like humans, because it will take away our opportunities to disconnect and relax. If an organism never has a chance to rest, it eventually collapses and dies. But how will we get a relentless network to slow down and allow us some breaks?"

"Imagine a situation—in twenty years, say—when somebody in Beijing or San Francisco possesses the entire personal history of every politician, journalist, colonel, and CEO in your country: every text they ever sent, every web search they ever made, every illness they suffered, every sexual encounter they enjoyed, every joke they told, every bribe they took. Would you still be living in an independent country, or would you now be living in a data colony? What happens when your country finds itself utterly dependent on digital infrastructures and AI-powered systems over which it has no effective control? Such a situation can lead to a new kind of data colonialism in which control of data is used to dominate faraway colonies. Mastery of AI and data could also give the new empires control of people’s attention. As we have already discussed, in the 2010s American social media giants like Facebook and YouTube upended the politics of distant countries like Myanmar and Brazil in pursuit of profit. Future digital empires may do something similar for political interests."

"During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was in many places literally made of metal: barbed wire separated one country from another. Now the world is increasingly divided by the Silicon Curtain. The Silicon Curtain is made of code, and it passes through every smartphone, computer, and server in the world. The code on your smartphone determines on which side of the Silicon Curtain you live, which algorithms run your life, who controls your attention, and where your data flows. It is becoming difficult to access information across the Silicon Curtain, say between China and the United States, or between Russia and the EU. Moreover, the two sides are increasingly run on different digital networks, using different computer codes. Each sphere obeys different regulations and serves different purposes."

"[I]f humans are so smart, why are we so stupid?"

"The problem is in our information. ...Why is it that the quality of our information did not improve over thousands of years..? Why is it that... societies ...have been as susceptible as Stone Age tribes to mass delusion.., psychosis, and the rise of destructive ideologies like Stalinism and Nazism?"

"[A] dollar bill... has no objective value. ...[T]hey ...have value because the greatest storytellers.., the finance ministers, ...bankers, ...investors ...tell us a story ...As long as millions ...believe, they are willing to work ..."

"[F]or the first time in history... there is another agent... that can create stories, economic theories, new... currencies, music, poems, images, videos, and this... is AI... an alien intelligence."

"[I]n the United States there is a legal path open for AIs to become s, because.., unlike other countries.., corporations are... legal persons that... have rights like freedom of speech. ...[Y]ou incorporate an AI. ....[I]t can open a bank account.., go online and offer its services.., and earn money, and... invest it, and... earns billions... We could be in a situation when the richest person... is not a human being."

"[T]he richest person in the US is giving billions... to candidates in exchange for... broadening the rights of AIs. ...This is no longer a science fiction scenario."

"[T]he... solution.., good institutions... characterized by... strong self-correcting mechanisms... that allow... an entity, a human.., an animal or an institution, to identify and correct its own mistakes."

"[T]he heart of democratic systems is this self-correcting. ...Elections are a self-correcting mechanism."

"In dictatorships there is no... self-correcting mechanism."

"Traditional religions... were characterized by claiming to be infallible, that their holy book, their sacred tradition never makes any mistake.., therefore there is no mechanism... to identify and correct mistakes...factual, also moral mistakes."

"The tenth commandment says that you should not covet your neighbor's field.., ox, or... slaves. According to the 10th commandment, God has no problem with people owning slaves, just... with coveting the slaves of somebody else."

"[T]here is no mechanism to correct the text of the Bible."

"The U.S. constitution originally... enabled slavery, but... had an amendment.., a self-correcting mechanism... to forbid slavery."

"The whole of science... is a self-correcting mechanism. ...[S]cientific journals publish ...corrections to previous publications.., to past mistakes or past lacuna."

"Every large scale human system is based on... mythology and bureaucracy. ...Every country, to convince its ...citizens why it should exist, tells ...national or religious mythology .., gives the motivation.., inspiration.., reason... You... need to build roads.., hospitals.., armies and sewage systems... to avoid s ...so you need to collect taxes. ...[M]ythology encourages ...or explains ...why ...So ...citizens will enjoy good healthcare ...and ...sewage system that protects ...from .., ... [etc.]"

"[T]here is nothing wrong about it. Nationalism and patriotism have been one of the... best inventions ...All other social animals ...care only about a small [intimate] circle ...This was ...true of our ancestors ...The miracle of nationalism and patriotism ...makes us care about millions of strangers ..."

"Nationalism is not about hating foreigners and wanting to kill the others. It's about loving our compatriots... and... paying taxes honestly..."

"[I]nformation isn't truth. Most information is not truth."

"[I]f we... flood the world with information and expect the truth to float up, it will not. It will sink."

"Unless we... construct institutions that invest in truth, we'll be flooded by fiction.., illusion.., delusion and junk information."

"If you want millions... cooperating.., create some... mythology or ideology and convince... people... [B]ombard then with... stories and images.., and this is how you gain power. ...[I]n this balance, how much truth ...and how much fiction and delusions do you need ...to construct the Soviet Union? ...a little truth and a lot of fiction. ...[T]his is true of most of the large scale s... throughout... history."

"[[Totalitarianism|[T]otalitarianism]] and democracy... are different information networks."

"Democracy is a conversation. ...Imagine a large group of people... and... a group of robots... start talking... loudly.., emotionally and persuasively, and you can't tell who is a human... That is... what we are now living through."

"[T]he democratic conversation is breaking down all over the world because the algorithms are hijacking it. ...We are losing the ability to hold a reasoned conversation... [W]e need to ban bots [fake humans] from the conversation. AIs should be welcome... only if they identify as AIs."

"[M]y... recommendation is to go on an information diet... Information is the food of the mind. ...[I]t is not good for the body to eat too much food or... . ...More information isn't always good for you. ...[T]ake time for information fasts. ...[W]atch the quality of the information we feed our mind."

"[I]t's completely different from the human mind. The whole question of "when will AI reach the same level... as human intelligence?" This is ridiculous. It's like asking, "When will airplanes finally be like birds?" They will never, ever be like birds.., and they can do many... things that birds can't. ...AIs and humans ...are not on the same trajectory behind us. They are on a completely different trajectory, for better or for worse."

"[T]he fact that AIs... cannot cooperate so far... is wonderful news. I hope it's true. I hope it will remain like that, otherwise we are in very... deep trouble."

"[T]he lesson from the history about intelligence: You don't need a lot of intelligence to change the world and potentially to cause havoc. You can change the world with relatively little intelligence. ...I'm not referring to anybody in particular."

"The other thing we've learned about intelligence is that the most intelligent entities on the planet can also be the most deluded. Human beings are by far, so far, the most intelligent beings on the planet and the most deluded. We believe ridiculous things that no chimpanzee or dog or pig would ever dream of believing.., that if you... kill other people.., after you die, you go to heaven... because of the wonderful thing you did: you killed... these other members of your species."

"When I say that you can change the world with relatively little intelligence: Humans have already done much of the hard work for the AIs. ...[I]f you drop an AI in the middle of the African and tell it, "Take over the world!" It can't. ...But, if first you have these apes who build all these bureaucratic systems, like the , and then... drop the AI into the existing financial system.., that's... much easier. ...You don't need motor skills. You don't need even to understand the world. ...The financial system is the ideal playground for AI. It's... purely informational."

"[T]o train AIs to make a million dollars, create a million AIs. Give them some seed money. ...[I]f ...a few AIs succeeded.., replicate them."

"What happens to the world if more and more of the financial system is shaped by AIs..? Even though they can't walk down the street, they know how to invest money better than humans. It's a... very limited intelligence..."

"Social media is run to some extent by very primitive AIs, these algorithms that control our news feed... [etc.] Look what they did in 10 years. We created a human system, media, and then we introduced the AIs into our system... [I]t's an informational system, and they took it over, and... to a large extent, wrecked the world."

"They are not the only reason... for the mess now in the world, but if you think about what extremely primitive AIs did within the human created system... of media, then..."

"We are at a point when we are conducting this huge historical experiment, and we just don't know... how do we build a self-correcting mechanism into it? How do we make sure that if we get the answer wrong, we'll have a second chance?"

"The model... is the last big , which is the Industrial Revolution. When the Industrial Revolution begins in the early 19th century, nobody has an idea how to build a benign, good . This immense new power: steam engines, railroads, steam ships. How do you use them for good? ...[D]ifferent people have different ideas, and they experiment..."

"European imperialism was one experiment. Some people say, "The only way to build an industrial society is to build an empire. You cannot build an industrial society on the level of one country because you must control the and the markets. You must have an empire!""

"Then you have people who say, "It must be a totalitarian society. Only a totalitarian system like Bolshevism or... Nazism. The immense powers of industry can only be controlled by a totalitarian society.""

"[L]ooking back from the early 21st century... we can say, "Oh, we know what the answer was. We think we know." It took 200 years of terrible wars, and hundreds of millions... of casualties, and injuries that are not even healed today, to find out how to build a benign . And this was just steam engines!"

"Now we are dealing with potentially superintelligent agents. Nobody has any experience with building a hybrid human AI society. We should be a lot more humble... We think we know how to build it! No we don't!"

"[H]ow do we build a self-correcting mechanism so if we make the wrong bet, this is not the end?"

"[W]e are thinking on different time scales. ...A lot of the conversations here in Davos.., when they say "long term" they mean like 2 years. When I say long term I mean like 200 years. It's like, it's the Industrial Revolution. The first commercial railway has been opened between Manchester and Liverpool in 1830. This is now... 1835, and we are having this discussion. People are saying, "The Industrial Revolution is moving so slowly. They told us that railways and steam engines will change the world. So what? So a few people are going between Manchester and Liverpool. It didn't change anything. This is all science fiction. Because of the time scale, we have no idea. Even if... all progress in AI stops today, the stone has been thrown into the pool, but it just hit the water. We have no idea what are the waves, even by the AIs that already have been deployed, say a year or two ago."

"Social consequences are a completely different thing. You cannot run history in a laboratory and see... the social consequences of invent[ion]. ...You create the first steam engine, you can test for accidents. You cannot test what will be the geopolitical... or cultural implications of a steam engine in a laboratory. It's the same with AI. So it's... far too soon to know."

"I'm mainly concerned about the lack of concern that... we are creating, we are deploying.., maybe the most powerful technology in human history, and a lot of very smart and powerful people are worried about.., "What will the investors say in the next quarterly report?" They think in terms of a few months, or a year or two."

"[I]t is not true–no, it is not true–that we have uprooted the Arabs.We have not uprooted them; we have shown them the way to a better life,and we shall continue to do this until they understand that we have a common interest in reviving the Middle East, and that this task can be achieved only on the basis of a strong Jewish Palestine."

"There is no official anti-Semitism in Russia; anti-Semitism in Russia is a crime against the State."

"Modern science explicitly and emphatically rejects teleology."

"A scientific theory is a concise and coherent set of concepts, claims, and laws (frequently expressed mathematically) that can be used to precisely and accurately explain and predict natural phenomena. A theory should include a mechanism that explains how its concepts, claims, and laws arise from lower-level theories."

"A good rule of thumb for diagnosing an activity as pseudoscientific is the existence of ad hoc explanations: “my telepathic powers aren’t working today because of a force field emanating from the hostile talk-show host.” There are no “bad-gravity days” and there are no days when your TV set stops working because electromagnetic waves feel hostility."

"Concise and coherent is not the same as “simple and obvious.”"

"The statement “I don’t see how X could have evolved” simply means that you cannot see how X evolved, not that X could not have evolved."

"To brand evolution as “just a theory” is the finest compliment one can confer on it!"

"ID (intelligent design) is essentially a total failure of the imagination; just because you do not see how something could have evolved, doesn’t mean that it didn’t."

"Needless to say, there is no formal or mathematical content to ID—a “theory” that explains everything, explains nothing, and predicts nothing. ID cannot explain why millions of species were created and then became extinct. Even more importantly, it cannot explain “mistakes” in the design of living organisms such as us."

"Intelligent Design is simply a dead end; it does not deserve to be called a theory."

"We can define a fact as an observation backed up by such a preponderance of evidence that no useful purpose would be served by doubting it."

"It is important to distinguish between the scientific concept of law as a generalization, and the social concept of law which is prescriptive and normative. A desire for tolerance in respecting the laws of different social systems must not lead us into the mistake of attributing volition to the entities of science or relativism to scientific laws."

"The difference between these beliefs and the beliefs of religions is that scientific beliefs are methodological, not propositional...It is the absence of propositional beliefs that distinguishes science from a belief system. There is no proposition of the content of science that is accepted upon belief alone."

"Imaginary numbers are not imaginary and the theory of complex numbers is no more complex than the theory of real numbers. Complex numbers are as intuitive for an electronics engineer as -100 is for the average person with an overdrawn bank account."

"Social Darwinism and eugenics are unscientific in two aspects. First, they commit the naturalistic fallacy, which is the assumption that what is, must be. The fact that the natural environment selects for reproductive advantage does not mean that we, as humans, should be forcibly selecting people according to some preconceived notions. The second nonscientific aspect of these movements was their narrow interpretation of the meaning of fitness. In evolution, this simply means fitness to survive and reproduce, not fitness according to some externally imposed criteria. Darwin himself never engaged in these speculations, nor did he support these perversions of his theory."

"Unfortunately, the universe does not come with an instructor’s manual and technical support is as hard to get as it is for some software packages."

"Until creationists accept that their claims must be falsifiable and show how they could be falsified, creationism cannot be said to be a scientific theory."

"Popper’s attempt to construct a methodology from falsification may have been flawed, but the concept is central in the demarcation of science from nonscience. No matter how strong one’s convictions, a true scientist will always allow for the possibility that her results may be falsified; if she denies this possibility or refuses to abandon or modify a theory in the face of repeated falsifications, you can be sure that you are dealing with pseudoscience, not science."

"Scientists refuse to study astrology, not because of prejudice or because there is a conspiracy afoot, but simply because there is not a shred of evidence that would justify the expenditure of valuable time from a career."

"Enormous resources are invested in pseudoscience that could be better invested in improving the health and education of the public."

"If ghosts and witches are not yet altogether exploded, it is the fault, not so much of the ignorant people, as of the law and the government that have neglected to enlighten them."

"The charm of our studies, the enchantment of science, is that, everywhere and always, we can give the justification of our principles and the proof of our discoveries."

"Just because people doing science are embedded in a particular social and cultural milieu, it doesn’t follow that science is not universal."

"Science has also been analyzed by sociologists, political scientists and literary critics, who make little or no effort to understand the scientific subjects that they are analyzing. These critiques, known under the umbrella label of postmodernism, are seen by scientists as uninformed and pernicious in their effects on the real problems that arise in the relationship between science and society."

"The scientific point of view is that such claims of postmodernism are a travesty that comes from mixing ideology and politics with science."

"Our existence in this world seems insignificant within the extent of space and of time. Therefore, nonreligious people have to come to terms with living in a world full of uncertainty and unknowns. Nevertheless, many people prefer facing the uncertainty, rather than believing in a certainty that makes no sense to them."

"If the Moon is made of green cheese, then Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo. We would be committing this fallacy (i. e., affirming the consequent) if we used this sentence to claim that the Moon is made of green cheese. Pseudosciences employ this fallacy frequently, because it enables you to claim the truth of any premise you wish simply by choosing a true conclusion."

"It is clear today that modern science developed when people stopped debating metaphysical questions about the world and instead concerned themselves with the discovery of laws that were primarily mathematical."

"Why was progress in computing technology so fast compared with the lack of progress in space travel? The reason is very simple: computing technology is only now approaching scientific limits such as quantum uncertainty and the speed of light, while space technology has already run into its limits that derive from the basic principles of physics and chemistry."

"In a previous paper we showed that a static (nonrotating) black hole cannot be endowed with exterior scalar-meson or massive vector-meson fields. Here we show that the same is true for massive spin-2 meson fields. We also extend the above results to the case of a rotating stationary black hole. We conclude from our results that a black hole in its final (static or stationary) state cannot interact with the exterior world via the strong interactions which are mediated by meson fields such as the π (scalar), ρ (vector), and ƒ (spin-2). A direct consequence of this is the impossibility of determining the baryon number of the black hole by means of exterior measurements alone. This results in the transcendence of the law of baryon-number conservation as originally predicted by Wheeler."

"We show that it is natural to introduce the concept of black-hole entropy as the measure of information about a black-hole interior which is inaccessible to an exterior observer. Considerations of simplicity and consistency, and dimensional arguments indicate that the black-hole entropy is equal to the ratio of the black-hole area to the square of the Planck length times a dimensionless constant of order unity. A different approach making use of the specific properties of Kerr black holes and of concepts from information theory leads to the same conclusion, and suggests a definite value for the constant."

"Black holes set a limitation on the number of species of elementary particles—quarks, leptons, neutrinos—which may exist. And black holes lead to a fundamental limitation on the rate at which information can be transferred for given message energy by any communication system."

"The DM halo hypothesis is evidently an attempt to resolve the acceleration discrepancy within orthodox gravitation theory. But in coming to terms with this discrepancy, suspicion fell on Newtonian gravity already early in the game. Zwicky, who had exposed the acceleration discrepancy in clusters of galaxies ..., opined much later that the discrepancy may reflect a failure of conventional physics ..."

"Within the DM paradigm the Tully-Fisher law must arise from galaxy formation since it connects luminosity of baryonic matter with a dynamical property, rotation, which is seen as dominated by the DM halo. But it has not been easy to derive Tully-Fisher from any natural connection between the two components. And as R. H. Sanders has pointed out, the messiness of galaxy formation is hardly the natural backdrop for such a sharp correlation between galaxy properties. The sharpness needs a dynamical reason as opposed to an evolutionary one."

"There is a prescription that works well, MOND, but the reason it works so well is not known. You may say that MOND tells us how the real theory of gravity should look."

"Bekenstein incorporated black hole entropy into a generalized second law—that the sum of the entropy outside black holes plus the newly proposed entropy of black holes must never decrease—and carefully considered processes that might violate it. To avoid violations, he found that he had to assume limitations on how close to the black hole’s horizon one could lower matter. Those ideas eventually evolved into a proposal for a bound on the entropy-to-energy ratio of matter confined to a region of given size."

"Jacob was the first physicist to hear from me about MOND. It was 1982; Jacob was still at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheba. I went there from Rehovot with my initial MOND trilogy of preprints in my bag to tell Jacob and benefit from his advice. I had not prepared him for what was in these preprints. Jacob was immediately captured, but he also warned me — as I vividly remember — that this is going to encounter much opposition, but also that I should not heed such opposition. He was drawing on his own experience with black-hole entropy and on how his ideas had been received a decade earlier."

"There was no Zionist 'plan' or blanket policy of evicting the Arab population, or of 'ethnic cleansing'" and "the demonisation of Israel is largely based on lies—much as the demonisation of the Jews during the past 2,000 years has been based on lies. And there is a connection between the two."

"I don’t see how we get out of it", he says in reference to Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state. "Already today there are more Arabs than Jews between the [Mediterranean] sea and the Jordan. The whole territory is unavoidably becoming one state with an Arab majority. Israel still calls itself a Jewish state, but a situation in which we rule an occupied people that has no rights cannot persist in the 21st century, in the modern world. And as soon as they do have rights, the state will no longer be Jewish." He added: "The Palestinians look at everything from a broad, long-term perspective. They see that at the moment, there are five-six-seven million Jews here, surrounded by hundreds of millions of Arabs. They have no reason to give in, because the Jewish state can’t last. They are bound to win. In another 30 to 50 years they will overcome us, come what may" and "Those among the Jews who can, will flee to America and the West.""

"No reasonable person still believes that there were no acts of expulsion and massacre by the Jewish side in the 1948 war, which was launched by the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states and which in my view was a justified war in defense of the Jewish community. It was a war in which the Arabs also committed massacres (at the Haifa refineries and in Kfar Etzion) and expulsions (from the Jewish Quarter in the Jerusalem’s Old City, for example), though to a lesser degree."

"A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on."

"There is no justification for acts of rape. There is no justification for acts of massacre. Those are war crimes. But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don't think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes."

"My turning point began after 2000. I wasn't a great optimist even before that. True, I always voted Labor or Meretz or Sheli and in 1988 I refused to serve in the territories and was jailed for it, but I always doubted the intentions of the Palestinians. The events of Camp David and what followed in their wake turned the doubt into certainty. When the Palestinians rejected the proposal of [[[Ehud Barak|prime minister Ehud] Barak]] in July 2000 and the Clinton proposal in December 2000, I understood that they are unwilling to accept the two-state solution. They want it all: Lod and Acre and Jaffa."

"The bombing of the buses and restaurants really shook me. They made me understand the depth of the hatred for us. They made me understand that the Palestinian, Arab and Muslim hostility toward Jewish existence here is taking us to the brink of destruction.... Palestinian society is a very sick society. It should be treated the way we treat individuals who are serial killers. Maybe over the years the establishment of a Palestinian state will help in the healing process. But in the meantime, until the medicine is found, they have to be contained so that they will not succeed in murdering us.... Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another."

"Thus, as already mentioned, the scholarly consensus is that Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948. Israel’s leading historian on the topic, Benny Morris, although having done more than anyone else to clarify exactly what happened, nonetheless concludes that, morally, it was a good thing—just as, in his view, the 'annihilation' of Native Americans was a good thing—that, legally, Palestinians have no right to return to their homes, and that, politically, Israel’s big error in 1948 was that it hadn’t 'carried out a large expulsion and cleansed the whole country—the whole Land of Israel, as far as the Jordan' of Palestinians."

"Historians who have examined Israeli history, as they would any other, trying to disentangle myth from fact and challenging accepted wisdom, have similarly found themselves in a minefield. The “new history” by historians such as Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris is, said Shabtai Teveth, a journalist and biographer of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, “a farrago of distortions, omissions, tendentious readings, and outright falsifications.” Israel, as we shall see, is by no means the only society to have its history wars, but because so much is at stake there, from the very identity of the nation to its right to exist on its land, the conflict can get ferocious."

"His 1988 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, drove a coach and horses through the claim that the Palestinians left Palestine of their own accord or on orders from their leaders. With a great wealth of recently declassified material, he analysed the role that Israel played in precipitating the Palestinian exodus. … The hallmark of his approach was to stick as closely as possible to the documentary evidence, to record rather than to evaluate. While his findings were original and arresting, he upheld the highest standards of historical scholarship, and he wrote with almost clinical detachment. ... The message, pithily summed up in a long interview that Benny gave to Yediot Aharonot about his highly publicised conversion, is that 'the Arabs are responsible'. Where no evidence is available to sustain the argument of Arab intransigence, Benny makes it up by drawing on his fertile imagination. … His post-conversion interpretation of history is old history with a vengeance. It is indistinguishable from the propaganda of the victors."

"(The Sufis) established their khanaqahs on the sites of Buddhist shrines, and (it) fitted well into the religious situation in Bengal."

"People predict by making up stories. People predict very little and explain everything. People live under uncertainty whether they like it or not. People believe they can tell the future if they work hard enough. People accept any explanation as long as it fits the facts. The handwriting was on the wall. It was just the ink that was invisible. People often work hard to obtain information they already have and avoid new knowledge. Man is a deterministic device thrown into a probabilistic Universe. In this match, surprises are expected. Everything that has already happened must have been inevitable. A part of good science is to see what everyone else can see but think what no one else has ever said. The difference between being very smart and very foolish is often very small. So many problems occur when people fail to be obedient when they are supposed to be obedient, and fail to be creative when they are supposed to be creative The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours. It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."

"It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place."

"Let us take what the terrain gives."

"“It's frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on."

"He who sees the past as surprise-free is bound to have a future full of surprises."

"Creeping determinism."

"Happy species endowed with infinite appreciation of pleasures and low sensitivity to pain would probably not survive the evolutionary battle."

"People who make a difference do not die alone. Something dies in everyone who was affected by them. Amos made a great deal of difference, and when he died, life was dimmed and diminished for many of us. There is less intelligence in the world. There is less wit. There are many questions that will never be answered with the same inimitable combination of depth and clarity. There are standards that will not be defended with the same mix of principle and good sense. Life has become poorer. There is a large Amos-shaped gap in the mosaic, and it will not be filled. It cannot be filled because Amos shaped his own place in the world, he shaped his life, and even his dying. And in shaping his life and his world, he changed the world and the life of many around him."

"Human bondage in it's various forms existed in almost all known historical societies and cultures. Since biblical times all monotheist religions have sanctioned slavery, although they did try to mitigate its harsh realities; other belief systems were not free from various forms of enslavement either."

"An initial obstacle to an open and honest treatment of enslavement in Ottoman and other Islamic societies is the "attitude hurdle". Writers about Islamic societies in general have been sensitive ...to any shred of criticism be it hedged , balanced or even implied. The orientalist tradition.. in Middle eastern studies has been seen...deprecating towards Arabs and Muslims."

"Too often the debate over history of enslavement has been suppressed by reluctance of Arab and Muslim writers to engage in an open discussion...about human bondage. Excepting modern Turkish scholarship and a few contributions from scholars in Arab countries the work produced by Arabs and Muslims has been apologetic and polemical."

"By leveling the moral playing field, we in know way wish to suspend judgement with regard to enslavement, nor do we advocate an abdication of responsibility...enslavement was wide spread and universally acceptable in historic societies , we do not shy from condemning it as reprehensible regardless of where and by whom it was practiced."

"In the early 1980s when my first work on Ottoman slave trade in 19th century was published I was keenly aware of the sensitivity of the subject and actively sought not to offend any of my readers...even in domestic slavery situations, especially when women were concerned, it would be quite inappropriate to describe their experience of enslavement as mild....Simply put the powerful (here Ottomans and Arabs) stand accused of bestowing on the unwilling powerless (here enslaved Africans) the questionable benefits.."

"Thus, the Jewish empowerment entailed in creating a Jewish state was not merely a matter of guaranteeing external, physical security of the Jews. Ultimately, its aim is to provide an internal security of the soul, which is the indispensable precondition for the emergence of a noble, uniquely Jewish character and civilization."

"Proverbs is in many respects a work on ethics, presenting arguments concerning the manner in which moral precepts relate to life and the good; Job investigates the reasons good individuals (and, by implication, good nations) should suffer catastrophe; Esther seeks an account of how God’s will works in political circumstances in which one sees nothing but the decisions and deeds of human actors; and so forth."

"The fact is that man’s mind is limited, and his understanding only partial. The biblical narrative makes this point unequivocally with respect to Moses, in reporting that he could not see God’s face, but only his back. And it was no less true of the other prophets of Israel, who saw things in different ways because each of them was limited in his understanding, and to his own point of vantage."

"If the relationship between man and God were supposed to consist of man’s acceptance of a paragraph of propositions that “raises among ourselves no other questions,” there would be no sense at all in God’s promising that if man inquires and seeks, he will be told “great things” that had until now been hidden."

"The purpose of the biblical editors, in gathering together such diverse and often sharply conflicting texts, was not to construct a unitary work with an unequivocal message. It was rather to assemble a work capable of capturing and reflecting a given tradition of inquiry so readers could strive to understand the various perspectives embraced by this tradition, and in so doing build up an understanding of their own."

"Suffice it to say that the God of Israel loves those who disobey for the sake of what is right, and is capable of being pleased when a man has used his freedom to wrestle with him and to prevail, so long as the path on behalf of which he struggles ultimately proves to be the right one in God’s eyes."

"Either you support, in principle, the ideal of an international government or regime that imposes its will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the absence of such an international government or regime."

"The nationalism I grew up with is a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference. This is opposed to imperialism, which seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime."

"Progressives regarded Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the Atlantic Charter of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as beacons of hope for mankind—and this precisely because they were considered expressions of nationalism, promising national independence and self-determination to enslaved peoples around the world. Conservatives from Teddy Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower likewise spoke of nationalism as a positive good, and in their day Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were welcomed by conservatives for the “new nationalism” they brought to political life. In other lands, statesmen from Mahatma Gandhi to David Ben-Gurion led nationalist political movements that won widespread admiration and esteem as they steered their peoples to freedom."

"An order of independent nations would permit diverse forms of self-government, religion, and culture in a “world of experiments” that would benefit all mankind."

"The new world they envision is one in which liberal theories of the rule of law, the market economy, and individual rights—all of which evolved in the domestic context of national states such as Britain, the Netherlands, and America—are regarded as universal truths and considered the appropriate basis for an international regime that will make the independence of the national state unnecessary."

"This same conviction that one has grasped the ultimate political truth and that all must now accept it likewise characterized Lenin’s thought and Soviet imperialism during its entire seventy-year course. And it appears again in our own time in the doctrines of European Union, which finds no satisfaction in the rule of one nation, but seeks constantly to impose an ever-greater uniformity on all nations in accordance with the political truths its bureaucrats regard as universally evident."

"British and American concepts of individual liberty are not universals that can be immediately understood and desired by everyone, as is often claimed. They are themselves the cultural inheritance of certain tribes and nations."

"The socialist has always believed that the necessary knowledge is at hand, so there is no need for competition in the marketplace. The economy needs only to be directed by a rational planner who will dictate the transactions that are to proceed for everyone’s benefit. The capitalist, on the other hand, has understood this proposal to be nothing but a conceit, a product of human arrogance and folly—because in reality there is no human being, and no group of human beings, that possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to correctly dictate how an entire economy should proceed for everyone’s benefit. Instead, the capitalist argues, from a skeptical and empirical point of view, that we should permit many independent economic actors and allow them freely to compete in developing and providing economic products and services. It is understood that because each of these competing business enterprises pursues a different set of aims, and is organized in a manner that is different from the others, some will succeed and some will fail. But those that succeed will do so in ways that no rational planner could have predicted in advance, and their discoveries will then be available for the imitation and refinement of others. In this way, the economy as a whole flourishes from this competition."

"Enlightenment rationalism, to the extent that its program is taken seriously, is an engine of perpetual revolution, which brings about the progressive destruction of every inherited institution, yet without ever being able to consolidate a stable consensus around any new ones."

"Philosophers often make the mistake of supposing that a subject is worthy of study only if it is found always and everywhere. But many of the most profound and important things are not found everywhere. This is because artifice, which is the alteration of untamed nature, is itself a part of man's nature."

"Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Kant never had children. Descartes's only daughter, born outside of marriage, died at the age of five. Rousseau had five children with a mistress but abandoned them all to an orphanage in infancy. In other words, Enlightenment rationalism was the construction of men who had no real experience of family life or what it takes to make it work. Enlightenment liberal political theory, which resolves around the free individual who accepts only those obligations to which he consents, was invented by men who did live in more or less this way. It is a political theory made in the image of unmarried, childless individuals, and the more people repeat its tenets, the more they act like unmarried, childless individuals."

"Political conservatism cannot be separated from personal conservatism. Dissolute individuals, those who are incapable of preserving and restoring traditional norms in their own lives, are not a material out of which cohesive and enduring families can be built. No tribe or nation can persist if its sons and daughters are not zealous to preserve their inheritance intact and to restore it when it has decayed or been forgotten."

"Conservatism begins at home."

"Shameful that a man like that, a former US president, abets propaganda and disseminates things that wound the spirit of Israel’s fighters and its citizens."

"Since external evidence is necessary to corroborate a view derived solely from the Muslim literary account, lack of such corroboration is an important argument against that account's historicity. This approach is therefore more open than the 'traditional' to acceptance of an argumentum e silentio. For if we are ready to discount an uncorroborated report of an event, we must accept that there may be nothing with which to replace it: that the event simply did not happen. That there is no evidence for it outside of the "traditional account" thus becomes positive evidence in support of the hypothesis that it did not happen. A striking example is the lack of evidence, outside the Muslim literature, for the view that the Arabs were Muslim at the time of the Conquest."

"[Do you believe that the Jewish people deserve a state?] No, definitely not! The Muslim people don't deserve a state, the Christian people don't deserve a state [...] People of faith deserve that their religion be respected. People, who are part of a national movement, deserve a state. [But] Judaism is not nationalism. Judaism is a religion. Zionism is an ideology that believes that Judaism is a national movement, but most Jews even today don't believe [that...] If it was possible to create a Jewish State not at the expense of the Palestinians and without dispossessing the Palestinians, [...there would be] no problem with the idea of a Jewish state."

"The debate between us is on one level between historians who believe they are purely objective reconstructers of the past, like [Benny] Morris, and those who claim that they are subjective human beings striving to tell their own version of the past, like myself. When we write histories, we built arches over a long period of time and we construct out of the material in front of us a narrative. We believe and hope that this narrative is a loyal reconstruction of what happened — although as was discovered by historiographers Morris had never bothered to read — we can not ride a train back in time to check it. Narratives of this kind, when written by historians involved deeply in the subject matter they write about, such as in the case of Israeli historians who write about the Palestine conflict, is motivated also — and this is not a fault but a blessing — by a deep involvement and a wish to make a point. This point is called ideology or politics. Zionist historians wanted to prove that Zionism was valid, moral and right and Palestinian historians wished to show that they were victimized and wronged.... I had a different point to make: I condemned the uprooting of the Palestinians and the violence inflicted on them, as well as the de—Arabization of Jews who came from Arab countries to Israel, the imposition of military rule on Palestinians in Israel before 1967 and the de—facto Apartheid policies put in place after 1967."

"I am socialist. [...] I think both my political commitment and historian known position developed simultaneously. And one supported the other. Because of my ideology I understood documents I saw in the archives the way I understood them, and because of the documents in the archives I became more convinced in the ideological way I took. A complicated process! Some colleague told me I ruined our cause by admitting my ideological platform. Why? Everybody in Israel and Palestine has an ideological platform. Indeed the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truthseekers."

"In both books Pappe in effect tells his readers: "This is what happened." This is strange, because it directly conflicts with a second major element in his historiographical outlook. Pappe is a proud postmodernist. He believes that there is no such thing as historical truth, only a collection of narratives as numerous as the participants in any given event or process; and each narrative, each perspective, is as valid and legitimate, as true, as the next. Moreover, every narrative is inherently political and, consciously or not, serves political ends. Each historian is justified in shaping his narrative to promote particular political purposes. Shlomo Aronson, an Israeli political scientist, years ago confronted Pappe with the ultimate problem regarding historical relativism: if all narratives are equally legitimate and there is no historical truth, then the narrative of Holocaust deniers is as valid as that of Holocaust affirmers. Pappe did not offer a persuasive answer, beyond asserting lamely that there exists a large body of indisputable oral testimony affirming that the Holocaust took place."

"Shafi‘i's treatment of the issue is slightly different. Speaking of grown-up Zoroastrian or polytheist women taken into captivity, he maintains that no sexual relations with them are allowed before they embrace Islam without bringing up the question of converting them forcibly. If the female captives are minor but were taken captive with at least one of their parents, the ruling is the same. If, however, the girl was captured without her parents, or one of her parents embraced Islam, she is considered a Muslim and is coerced into embracing it (nahkumu lahā bihukm al-Islām wa nujbiruhā ‘alayhi). Once this happens, sexual relations with her are lawful."

"We have also seen that according to the prevalent view of the traditionists, a female polytheist must be converted to Islam, by coercive measures if necessary, before any sexual relationship with her can take place... Conversion to Islam is not mentioned here as a necessary condition for sexual relations. In the opinion of Mujhid, the captive girl should shave her pubic hair, trim her hair and pare her nails. Then she should perform ablution, wash her clothes, pronounce the shahada and perform a Muslim prayer. But even if she refuses to do these things, her master is still allowed to have sexual relations with her once she has had one menstrual period in his house. And Safiıd b. al-Musayyab simply says that “there is nothing wrong in a man having sexual relations with his Zoroastrian slave-girl”... Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya observes, on the other hand, that: "they (i.e., the Prophet’s companions) did not make sexual relations with Arab captives contingent on their conversion; rather they had sexual relations with them after one menstrual period. God allowed them to do this and did not make it conditional on conversion." Summing up, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya says that there is not a single tradition which makes sexual relations with female captives contingent on their conversion."

"The prevalent view of the jurisprudents is that sexual intercourse of any kind is not permissible with Zoroastrian or idolatrous women. According to some, a Muslim who has intercourse with such a woman is (from the religious view point) not better than the infidel woman herself. This being so, most fuqaha maintain that women belonging to these groups should embrace Islam before any intercourse can take place. If they refuse, they are used as servants, but sexual intercourse with them is not permitted. This is evidently not an optimal solution, and numerous traditions maintain that women who refuse to embrace Islam willingly should be subjected to coercion."

"I think there is some broadness to the definition of what counts as a foundation model, and more generally, artificial intelligence."

"François Chollet posits that intelligence is not about how well a specialized model performs, but how good it is in learning new things, or in other words,"

"How well it can generalize across tasks."

"In this sense we are probably still far away from general intelligence and this is one of the reasons why I personally don’t like the term artificial intelligence."

"We don’t really understand and agree on what intelligence is."

"In large language models such as ChatGPT, the key to their success was the scale, being able to create very large models that can be trained on huge amounts of data."

"We don’t yet have anything of comparable scale in biology, and probably the main limitation is the amount of data we have."

"It is very expensive to obtain experimental data."

"It will be possible to overcome the lack of experimental data with simulation and it’s an interesting question how to combine simulated data."

"The range and diversity of problems in biology is significantly bigger than in language."

"It could be that in some applications we don’t necessarily need the kind of scale we find in ChatGPT."

"Biotech and pharma companies try to do it and successfully in many cases."

"One example is Recursion that scaled-up cell-painting technologies, allowing to image hundreds of millions of cells and see what happens to the cells. *When you perturb them either chemically or genetically."

"What I would like to do is to take a step back and look at the next generation of data sources where the consumer of the data will not be a human but a machine."

"If we say that the data does not necessarily need to be viewed by human scientists, we can come up with completely new experimental data sources."

"I am honoured and delighted to join Oxford, which has unparalleled expertise in AI and related fields and amazing students."

"I am looking forward to forging new collaborations and synergies within the Department and beyond that would allow us to develop the next generation."

"Learning methods that solve real-world problems and at the same time have the trust of domain experts and the broader public."

"Although a big part of the research on paraconsistent logics has so far been motivated by the paradoxes in naive set theory, and to developing alternative paraconsistent mathematics, I do not think that paraconsistent mathematics has real interest - at least not as long as we deal with truth in pure mathematics."

"For me the value of paraconsistent logics is as a potential instrument, to be used when there is a need to draw practical conclusions from an inconsistent body of "knowledge"."

"I am looking for excellent full-time or part-time graduate students to research cutting edge topics in networking and cyber security."

"My research interests span from distributed systems to tightly coupled multiprocessors. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical study of asynchrony and its effects in systems (both shared memory and message passing based), in concurrent programming (concurrent data structures and transactional memory), and in networking (network security, protecting against denial of service attacks and routing). I often examine synchronization and coordination problems in these areas using tools and models from theoretical computer science and related disciplines."

"The Riverhead Guard, our flag product, protects thousands of sites (including some from fortune-5, and many from fortune-500), keeping them up and running despite massive multi Gbps attacks over long periods of time. Riverhead was acquired by Cisco in 2004, after which I remained a director in Cisco until May of 2009. I have since then returned to a full time professorship position at Tel-Aviv University. 2014 -- 2016 Head of the Blavatnik School of Computer Science Tel-Aviv University."

"My research interests span the range from distributed systems to tightly coupled multiprocessors. In particular, I am interested in the theoretical study of asynchrony and its effects in systems (both shared memory and message passing based)"

"Combinatorics is primarily the mathematics of finite objects, investigating the properties of combinatorial structures. Its areas of study include exact and asymptotic enumeration, graph theory, probabilistic and extremal combinatorics, designs and finite geometries."

"The relations between combinatorics and other mathematical and scientific areas have been crucial in the development of the modern theory. Combinatorial concepts and questions appear naturally in many branches of mathematics, and the area has found applications in other disciplines as well."

"The core of most of the fundamental questions in theoretical computer science is combinatorial, as the notion of computation is based on manipulations with finite structures. The investigation of the limits of computation leads to basic combinatorial questions, and much of the design and analysis of efficient algorithms is also combinatorial in nature"

"In my research I tried (and still try) to develop effective techniques by tackling interesting problems. Solving such problems, especially ones with a history, is an important goal, but an even more important goal is the introduction of novel ideas and tools that can lead to further progress."

"Israel has traditionally always been a strong center of mathematical research. The Hebrew University has been particularly strong in Set Theory, Logic and Ergodic Theory. As mentioned, I used to come to the university only once a week."

"My parents. They taught me to believe in myself and my ability to achieve anything. They also taught me success that comes at the expense of others is not something to aspire to."

"I can intuitively understand when a technology has disruptive potential. During my years of research, this helped me focus my energy in the direction most likely to result in breakthroughs."

"I believe the best academic research touches people’s lives, so I wanted to apply social physics at scale in the real world. This became a huge passion and challenge, which led me to found Endor in 2014."

"Passion is one of the most important qualities in a leader. Without passion, it’s hard to build an argument that will compel people to follow you. Once you’ve found your passion, identify your vision and communicate it to your team in an inspiring way."

"We adopted the “love at first sight” approach to hiring. That means we only hire people whose eyes glitter with the realization that what we’re building is amazing."

"After the first interview, it should be clear that our company is the only place where they can imagine working. Once this feeling is mutual, we just have to make the numbers fit."