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Even if somebody is born with a particular talent, that talent will usually remain latent if it is not fostered, honed and exercised.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The Sumerians thereby released their social order from the limitations of the human brain, opening the way for the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires. The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called ‘writing’.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

There is no way out of the imagined order. When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order. Let’s consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad. There is nothing natural or obvious about this.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Voltaire said about God that ‘there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night’.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Mythology, the ancient sociologist would have thought, could not possibly enable millions of strangers to cooperate on a daily basis. But that turned out to be wrong. Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The handful of millennia separating the Agricultural Revolution from the appearance of cities, kingdoms and empires was not enough time to allow an instinct for mass cooperation to evolve.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Until the late modern era, more than 90 per cent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites – kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers – who fill the history books.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Peasants, on the other hand, spent most of their days working a small field or orchard, and their domestic lives centred on a cramped structure of wood, stone or mud, measuring no more than a few dozen metres – the house. The typical peasant developed a very strong attachment to this structure. This was a far-reaching revolution, whose impact was psychological as much as architectural. Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbours became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centred creature.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

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.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today. How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure. Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites. The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari