Yuval Noah Harari

"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."