• Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.
• The domestication of fire was a sign of things to come.
• There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.
• Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.
• As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as gods, nations and corporations.
• The Catholic alpha male abstains from sexual intercourse and childcare, even though there is no genetic or ecological reason for him to do so.
• immense diversity of imagined realities that Sapiens invented, and the resulting diversity of behaviour patterns, are the main components of what we call ‘cultures’. Once cultures appeared, they never ceased to change and develop, and these unstoppable alterations are what we call ‘history’.
• Sapiens did not forage only for food and materials. They foraged for knowledge as well. To survive, they needed a detailed mental map of their territory.
• Yet it is vital to ask questions for which no answers are available,
• It’s common today to explain anything and everything as the result of climate change, but the truth is that earth’s climate never rests.
• Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change.
• It is in constant flux. Every event in history occurred against the background of some climate change.
• Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered, only a few were suitable candidates for farming and herding. Those few species lived in particular places, and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occurred.
• Since we enjoy affluence and security, and since our affluence and security are built on foundations laid by the Agricultural Revolution, we assume that the Agricultural Revolution was a wonderful improvement.
• 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 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 evolutionary perspective is an incomplete measure of success. It judges everything by the criteria of survival and reproduction, with no regard for individual suffering and happiness.
• prefer to spend their days wandering over open prairies in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.
• see time and again how a dramatic increase in the collective power and ostensible success of our species went hand in hand with much individual suffering.
• Sapiens cast off its intimate symbiosis with nature and sprinted towards greed and alienation.
• Farming enabled populations to increase so radically and rapidly that no complex agricultural society could ever again sustain itself if it returned to hunting and gathering.