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Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

An imagined reality is not a lie. I lie when I say that there is a lion near the river when I know perfectly well that there is no lion there. There is nothing special about lies.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Peugeot is a figment of our collective imagination. Lawyers call this a ‘legal fiction’. It can’t be pointed at; it is not a physical object. But it exists as a legal entity. Just like you or me, it is bound by the laws of the countries in which it operates. It can open a bank account and own property. It pays taxes, and it can be sued and even prosecuted separately from any of the people who own or work for it.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end. Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation.1

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

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. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species?

— Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari

Anytime we believe that we live in a special place (e.g., the Earth as the center of the universe) or a special time (e.g., six thousand years after the creation of the universe), we should be extra careful that we’re not just stroking our fragile egos.

— We Have No Idea by Jorge Cham, Daniel Whiteson

you can remember things that happen in the past, but you can’t remember things that happen in the future.63 Time appears to have a preferred direction, and we have no idea why.

— We Have No Idea by Jorge Cham, Daniel Whiteson

She told her class once that meetings were not actually for communicating, but for fixing breakdowns in communication.

— Containment by Christian Cantrell

Beyond a certain point in the development of computer processor technology, the problem was no longer a shortage of CPU cycles, but instead reflected humanity's inability to ask their binary counterparts the right questions.

— Containment by Christian Cantrell

Millions of people had smoked at petrol stations, ridden roller coasters with microscopic stress fractures, flown in planes with leaky hydraulic lines, all without even knowing that the mysterious laws of the cosmos had put them on trial and, for whatever reason, decided in their favor.

— Containment by Christian Cantrell

Eliminating moving parts from machinery was the best way to improve reliability. Since the subatomic laws of the universe dictate that it's physically impossible for any moving part to move in precisely the same way every single time it moves, each and every moving part in a system represents some measure of unpredictability and unaccounted-for variability.

— Containment by Christian Cantrell