191 quotes
Anyone who has read a novel by Alexander Solzhenitsyn knows how Communism's egalitarian ideal produced brutal tyrannies that tried to control every aspect of life.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
As far as we can tell from a purely scientific viewpoint, human life has absolutely no meaning.
Religion can thus be defined as a system of human laws that is founded on a belief in superhuman laws.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Democracies die not only when people are not free to talk but also when people are not willing or able to listen.
Presidents and generals may not understand nuclear physics, but they have a good grasp of what nuclear bombs can do.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Like Buddhism, Communist believed in a superhuman order of natural and immutable laws that should guide human actions.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Christian success served as a model for another monotheist religion and that appeared in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century - Islam.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.
Cultivating wheat much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus - 'we do not know'.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Religious holidays such as Christmas have become shopping festivals.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Throughout history, males have been willing to risk and even sacrifice their lives, just so that people will say, 'He is a real man!
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Animals are the main victims of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in industrial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.
Introduction to Animal Liberation (2015)
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.
As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Revolutions are, by definition unpredictable. A predictable revolution never erupts.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
Consumerism sees the consumption of ever more products and services as a positive thing. It encourages people to treat themselves, spoil themselves, and even kill themselves slowly by overconsumption.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
To say that a husband 'raped' his wife was as illogical as saying that a man stole his own wallet.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
The extinction of the Australian Megafauna was probably the first significant mark Homo sapiens left on our planet.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)