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Title: Sapiens Authors: Yuval Noah Harari Category:books Number of Highlights: 26 Date: 2026-01-05 Last Highlighted: 2022-11-09
Highlights
Any large-scale human cooperation â whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe â is rooted in common myths that exist only in peoples collective imagination. (469)
Animism (from âanimaâ, âsoulâ or âspiritâ in Latin) is the belief that almost every place, every animal, every plant and every natural phenomenon has awareness and feelings, and can communicate directly with humans. (899)
Trekkers visiting the Siberian tundra, the deserts of central Australia and the Amazonian rainforest believe that they have entered pristine landscapes, virtually untouched by human hands. But thatâs an illusion. The foragers were there before us and they brought about dramatic changes even in the densest jungles and the most desolate wildernesses. (1018)
In order to reach Australia, humans had to cross a number of sea channels, some more than a hundred kilometres wide, and upon arrival they had to adapt nearly overnight to a completely new ecosystem. (1039)
Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2 A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. (1069)
Why did people make such a fateful miscalculation? For the same reason that people throughout history have miscalculated. People were unable to fathom the full consequences of their decisions. (1379)
One of historyâs 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 canât live without it. (1397)
Of all human collective activities, the one most difficult to organise is violence. To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money. (1764)
(The Sumerians used a combination of base-6 and base-10 numeral systems. (1934)
It is telling that the first recorded name in history belongs to an accountant, rather than a prophet, a poet or a great conqueror.1 (1944)
In the brain, all data is freely associated. When I go with my spouse to sign on a mortgage for our new home, I am reminded of the first place we lived together, which reminds me of our honeymoon in New Orleans, which reminds me of alligators, which remind me of dragons, which remind me of The Ring of the Nibelungen, and suddenly, before I know it, there I am humming the Siegfried leitmotif to a puzzled bank clerk. In bureaucracy, things must be kept apart. There is one drawer for home mortgages, another for marriage certificates, a third for tax registers, and a fourth for lawsuits. Otherwise, how can you find anything? Things that belong in more than one drawer, like Wagnerian music dramas (do I file them under âmusicâ, âtheatreâ, or perhaps invent a new category altogether?), are a terrible headache. So one is forever adding, deleting and rearranging drawers. (2035)
Confusingly, these signs are known as Arabic numerals even though they were first invented by the Hindus (even more confusingly, modern Arabs use a set of digits that look quite different from Western ones). But the Arabs get the credit because when they invaded India they encountered the system, understood its usefulness, refined it, and spread it through the Middle East and then to Europe. (2050)
how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance. (2081)
How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is âBiology enables, Culture forbids.â (2301)
In truth, our concepts ânaturalâ and unnaturalâ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ânaturalâ is âin accordance with the intentions of the God who created natureâ. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. (2309)
We still use our mouths for that purpose, but we also use them to kiss, speak and, if we are Rambo, to pull the pins out of hand grenades. Are any of these uses unnatural simply because our worm-like ancestors 600 million years ago didnât do those things with their mouths? (2315)
But specialisation created a problem â how do you manage the exchange of goods between the specialists? (2673)
Yet most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts â they developed money. (2700)
These creeds maintained that the superhuman order governing the world is the product of natural laws rather than of divine wills and whims. (3404)
Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. (3425)
What Smith says is, in fact, that greed is good, and that by becoming richer I benefit everybody, not just myself. Egoism is altruism. (4754)
Note: This is absolutely absurd but people believe it.
These magnates are far richer than the medieval nobility, but they are far less interested in extravagant consumption, and they spend a much smaller part of their profits on non-productive activities. (4780)
Note: You sure about that
The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs. (5270)
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. (5409)
The Industrial Revolution brought about dozens of major upheavals in human society. Adapting to industrial time is just one of them. (5431)
As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. (5992)