Yuval Noah Harari

[M]onotheistic brainwashing... caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry.

Only around the end of the nineteenth century did scientists come across a few observations that did not fit... with Newton's laws, and these led to the next revolution... the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

The Scientific Revolution... has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery... was... that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.

For most of history, humans knew nothing about 99.99 per cent of the organisms on the planet... the s. ...Each of us bears billions... They are our best friends, and deadliest enemies. Some... digest our food and clean our guts.., others cause illness and epidemics.

Money is not coins and bank notes. Money is anything that people... use... to represent... value... for... exchanging goods and services.

Revolutions are, by definition unpredictable.

Dualistic religions flourished for more than a thousand years. ...[B]etween 1500 BC and 1000 BC ...Zoroaster ...was active ...in Central Asia. His creed... became the most important of dualistic religions ...Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good... Ahura Mazda and the evil... Angra Mainyu.

[T]he modern Indian state is a child of the British Empire. The British killed, injured and persecuted... but... also united... warring kingdoms, principalities and tribes, creating a... national consciousness and a country that functioned... as a single political unit.

Money... is most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

To say that a husband 'raped' his wife was... illogical... As of 2006, there were still fifty-three countries where a husband could not be prosecuted for the rape of his wife... in Germany, rape laws were amended only in 1997...

[T]he first text of history contains no philosophical insight, no poetry, legends, laws, or... royal triumphs. They were humdrum economic documents, recording... taxes.., debts and... ownership of property.

Ancient scribes learned not merely to read and write, but also to use catalogues, dictionaries, calendars, forms and tables. They studied the internalised technique of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very different from those used by the brain.