Notes and Quotes - 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Yuval Noah Harari)

Finished on 22/4/19 in Brisbane, Australia.

"In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power. In theory, anyone can join the debate about the future of humanity, but it is so hard to maintain a clear vision. Frequently, we don’t even notice that a debate is going on, or what the key questions are. Billions of us can hardly afford the luxury of investigating, because we have more pressing things to do: we have to go to work, take care of the kids, or look after elderly parents. Unfortunately, history gives us no discounts. If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids - you and they will not be exempt from the consequences. This is very unfair; but who said history was fair?"

"In the beginning, the liberal story cared mainly about the liberties and privileges of middle-class European men, and seemed blind to the plight of working-class people, women, minorities and non-Westerners. When in 1918 victorious Britain and France talked excitedly about liberty, they were not thinking about the subjects of their worldwide empires. For example, Indian demands for self-determination were answered by the Amritsar massacre of 1919, in which the British killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators."

"Even in the wake of the Second World War, Western liberals still had a very hard time applying their supposedly universal values to non-Western people. This when the Dutch emerge in 1945 from five years of brutal Nazi occupation, almost the first thing they did was raise an army and send it halfway across the world to reoccupy the former colony of Indonesia. Whereas in 1940 the Dutch gave up their own independence after little more than four days of fighting, they fought for more than four long and bitter years to suppress Indonesian independence. No wonder that many national liberation movements throughout the work placed their hopes in communist Moscow and Beijing rather than on the self-proclaimed champions of liberty in the West."