Sapiens

Updated: November 5, 2019

Yuval Noah Harari traverses the entire human history, from the six human species that inhabited the earth to the only one today. Us. Homo sapiens.

Favorite quotes from the book:

“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.”

“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.”

“Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.”