Yuval Noah Harari — "The most powerful empires are not built on steel, but on stories."
The most powerful empires are not built on steel, but on stories.
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More from Yuval Noah Harari
"Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing."
"The most important question is not 'What do I want to be?', but 'What do I want to feel?'."
"The greatest danger is not that AI will rebel against us, but that it will be too good at doing what we tell it to do."
"Democracy is based on the belief that human collective wisdom outweighs individual genius."
"We are creating a new type of human, a 'Homo Deus'."
About Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976)
Israeli historian whose Sapiens (2011) and Homo Deus (2015) reframed big history for a mass audience and sold tens of millions of copies. Closely associated with Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel author and Harari's clearest intellectual ancestor) and Steven Pinker (data-driven optimist contemporary). For an intellectual contrast, see Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist and Maps of Meaning author — Peterson's Maps of Meaning argues that religious-mythological structure is the load-bearing architecture of human meaning — exactly the framing Harari's 'religion as useful fiction' thesis treats as historically transitory. The two are the largest-platform popular intellectuals of the 2010s with opposite views on whether religion encodes deep truth.