Jackson Smoot's Key Ideas from Sapiens
by Yuval Noah Harari

“Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies?”

“There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time.”

“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 luckily 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.”

“The pursuit of an easier life resulted in much hardship, and not for the last time. It happens to us today.”

“Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows…

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”

“there is no God, but don’t tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night.”

“money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.”

The real test of 'knowledge' is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Scientists usually assume that no theory is 100 per cent correct. Consequently, truth is a poor test for knowledge. The real test is utility.

A theory that enables us to do new things constitutes knowledge.

Racism was replaced by culturism.

Today's elites usually justify superiority in terms of historical differences between cultures rather than biological differences between races.

We no longer say, 'It’s in their blood.”

We say, "It”s in their culture.”

To understand modern economic history, you really need to understand just a single word.

The word is growth.

For better or worse, in sickness and in health, the modern economy has been growing like a hormone-soused teenager. It eats up everything it can find and puts on inches faster than you can count.

A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.