Skip to content

In Hindu polytheism, a single principle, Atman, controls the myriad gods and spirits, humankind, and the biological and physical world. Atman is the central essence or soul of the... universe.., of every individual and every phenomenon.

— Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

Another quote →

Topics

More quotes by Yuval Noah Harari

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)

All Yuval Noah Harari quotes →

You may also like

Reason is Life's sole arbiter, the magic Laby'rinth's single clue:
Worlds lie above, beyond its ken; what crosses it can ne'er be true.

Richard Francis Burton The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time.

Mircea Eliade Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (1967)

Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

Thomas Jefferson

The superior man loves his soul; the inferior man loves his property.

Confucius

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Yuval Noah Harari (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.