You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

This quote appears in *Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind* by Yuval Noah Harari (2014), page 32, making it one of the best-sourced quotes in popular literature. Harari uses it to illustrate the unique human capacity for collective belief in abstract fictions — money, religion, nations — which no other animal possesses. A monkey operates purely on immediate, tangible rewards; only humans can be motivated by promises of intangible future gains. This is Harari's central argument for why Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet: our ability to cooperate in large numbers around shared myths. The quote is correctly attributed to Harari and appears verbatim in the original English edition.