Pyramid Related Quotes

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If the meaning of life has become doubtful, if one's relations to others and to oneself do not offer security, then fame is one means to silence one's doubts. It has a function to be compared with that of the Egyptian pyramids or the Christian faith in immortality: it elevates one's individual life from its limitations and instability to the plane of indestructability; if one's name is known to one's contemporaries and if one can hope that it will last for centuries, then one's life has meaning and significance by this very reflection of it in the judgments of others.
Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom)
If you wish to alter or annihilate a pyramid of numbers in a serial relation, you alter or remove the bottom number. If we wish to annihilate the junk pyramid, we must start with the bottom of the pyramid: the Addict in the Street, and stop tilting quixotically for the "higher ups" so called, all of whom are immediately replaceable. The addict in the street who must have junk to live is the one irreplaceable factor in the junk equation. When there are no more addicts to buy junk there will be no junk traffic. As long as junk need exists, someone will service it.
William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch: The Restored Text)
When we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.
Sue Monk Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine)
Through the various branches of your tree, you are connected to the entirety of human history. When we talk about the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, we're not talking about a bunch of exotic strangers, we're talking about our great-great-many-times-great grandparents!
Laurence Overmire (Digging for Ancestral Gold: The Fun and Easy Way to Get Started on Your Genealogy Quest)
Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.
Christopher Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays)
Every authoritarian structure can be visualized as a pyramid with an eye on the top. This is the typical flow-chart of any government, any corporation, any Army, any bureaucracy, any mammalian pack. On each rung, participants bear a burden of nescience in relation to those above them. That is, they must be very, very careful that the natural sensory activities of being conscious organisms — the acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, drawing inferences from perception, etc. — are in accord with the reality-tunnel of those above them. This is absolutely vital; pack status (and “job security”) depends on it. It is much less important — a luxury that can easily be discarded — that these perceptions be in accord with objective fact.
Robert Anton Wilson (Prometheus Rising)
In football,’ he said, ‘the tactics adopted must always be in relation to the ability of the men on the side to carry them out successfully. Because of this, it is hard to lay down hard and fast rules.
Jonathan Wilson (Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics)
This looking from the bottom up is the catalyst for a reversal of consciousness, not only for ourselves but also for the most resistant among us. For when we stop perceiving, assuming, and theorizing from the top, the dominant view, and instead go to the bottom of the social pyramid and identify with those who are oppressed and disenfranchised, a whole new way of relating opens up. Until we look from the bottom up we have seen nothing.
Sue Monk Kidd (The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine)
In the time of the Equinox, the Sunrise illuminates the western part of the Great Pyramid's southern face, while the Sunset illuminates the eastern part of the northern face. This signals the heralding night time of the Duat by the overshadowed parts which align relatively in the direction of the Vernal Equinox.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Mill of Egypt: The Complete Series Fused)
How do we know whether the universe is getting bigger or the objects in it are getting smaller? You can’t say that the universe is getting bigger in relation to anything outside it, because there isn’t any outside for it to relate to. There isn’t any outside. But if the universe doesn’t have an out-side, then it goes on forever.
Robert Shea (The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan)
Pharaohs It took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place every day during the annual building season, roughly four months long. Few commentators on these facts can resist noting that this achievement is an amazing testimonial to the pharaoh’s iron control over the workers of Egypt. I submit, on the contrary, that pharaoh Khufu needed to exercise no more control over his workers at Giza than pharaoh Bill Gates exercises over his workers at Microsoft. I submit that Egyptian workers, relatively speaking, got as much out of building Khufu’s pyramid as Microsoft workers will get out of building Bill Gates’s pyramid (which will surely dwarf Khufu’s a hundred times over, though it will not, of course, be built of stone). No special control is needed to make people into pyramid builders—if they see themselves as having no choice but to build pyramids. They’ll build whatever they’re told to build, whether it’s pyramids, parking garages, or computer programs. Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.
Daniel Quinn (Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure)
The proximate causes of the Flemish “peasant” revolt were local and immediate; its roots, the reason it could occur in the first place, were four centuries in creation. As Europe’s population increased threefold between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Continent’s demographic pyramid changed its shape. The base grew larger relative to its peak, and more distant: the gap between nobility and peasantry got bigger and bigger. Families that were noble by birth became more and more “noble” in behavior: dressing more opulently, entertaining more lavishly, and housing themselves more extravagantly, while the rural peasantry lived more or less the same as their many times great-grandparents.
William Rosen (The Third Horseman: Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century)
Highly complex numbers like the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and Phi (sometimes called the Golden Proportion), are known as irrational numbers. They lie deep in the structure of the physical universe, and were seen by the Egyptians as the principles controlling creation, the principles by which matter is precipitated from the cosmic mind. Today scientists recognize the Comma of Pythagoras, Pi and the Golden Proportion as well as the closely related Fibonacci sequence are universal constants that describe complex patterns in astronomy, music and physics. ... To the Egyptians these numbers were also the secret harmonies of the cosmos and they incorporated them as rhythms and proportions in the construction of their pyramids and temples.
Jonathan Black
When Anthony showed me a pyramid that he used in training, with WHAT at the small part at the top, WHY in the middle, and HOW at the bottom, indicating the relative importance of the claim, their reasons, and then their method as topics of discussion, I was reminded of a deep canvassing layer cake. It became clear to me that all these people had independently discovered the principles that work best when it comes to persuasion.
David McRaney (How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion)
What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of relative unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object; as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist. What is unique about their perception of reality is that it is alive to the panic inherent in creation: Sylvia Plath somewhere named God "King Panic." And Panic is fittingly King of the Grotesque. What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types-biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him. The mosquitoes bloating themselves on blood, the maggots, the killerbees attacking with a fury and demonism, sharks continuing to tear and swallow while their own innards are being torn out-not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in "natural" accidents of all types: the earthquake buries alive 70 thousand bodies in Peru, automobiles make a pyramid heap of over 50 thousand a year in the U.S. alone, a tidal wave washes over a quarter of a million in the Indian Ocean. Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all its creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism's comfort and expansiveness. "Questo sol m'arde, e questo m'innamore," as Michelangelo put it.
Ernest Becker (The Denial of Death)
I got stoned one night and went home to see what it would be like relating to Mom and Dad in that condition. It was the same but different. Tolstoy coming out of her mouth, Bakunin out of his. And it was suddenly all weird and super-freaky, like Goddard shooting a Kafka scene: two dead Russians debating with each other, long after they were dead and buried, out of the mouths of a pair of Chicago Irish radicals. The young frontal-lobe-type anarchists in the city were in their first surrealist revival just then and I had been reading some of their stuff and it clicked. “You’re both wrong,” I said. “Freedom won’t come through Love, and it won’t come through Force. It will come through the Imagination.
Robert Shea (The Illuminatus! Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid/The Golden Apple/Leviathan)
The conclusion that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom were acquainted with both the Fibonacci series and the Golden Section, says Stecchini, is so startling in relation to current assumptions about the level of Egyptian mathematics that it could hardly have been accepted on the basis of Herodotus' statement alone, or on the fact that the phi [golden] proportion happens to be incorporated in the Great Pyramid. But the many measurements made by Professor Jean Philippe Lauer, says Stecchini, definitely prove the occurrence of the Golden Section throughout the architecture of the Old Kingdom.... Schwaller de Lubicz also found graphic evidence that the pharonic Egyptians had worked out a direct relation between pi and phi in that pi = phi^2 x 6/5.
Peter Tompkins (Secrets of the Great Pyramid: Two Thousand Years of Adventures & Discoveries Surrounding the Mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Cheops)
Today, what you think of this past, how you relate to it, determines what you think about the future of Ukraine. And what you think of the past is quite likely to be bound up with the history of your own family and where you live. This is true for the Donbass, a mining region, just as it is for anywhere else. People came from all over the Soviet Union to work and settle in this flat land pockmarked by pyramids and hills of slag and scruffy little mining and industrial towns. Donetsk was a working-class mining town. For many of its inhabitants then, Ukraine, which had been part of imperial Russia, was not a land where they had roots. With the demise of the Soviet Union it was harder for many of these people, almost all of whom spoke Russian as their first language, to identify with or to love Ukraine as their own country
Tim Judah (In Wartime: Stories from Ukraine)
Christianity and other traditional religions are still important players in the world. Yet their role is now largely reactive. In the past, they were a creative force. Christianity, for example, spread the hitherto heretical notion that all humans are equal before God, thereby changing human political structures, social hierarchies and even gender relations. In his Sermon on the Mount Jesus went further, insisting that the meek and oppressed are God’s favourite people, thus turning the pyramid of power on its head, and providing ammunition for generations of revolutionaries. In addition to social and ethical reforms, Christianity was responsible for important economic and technological innovations. The Catholic Church established medieval Europe’s most sophisticated administrative system, and pioneered the use of archives, catalogues, timetables and other techniques of data processing. The Vatican was the closest thing twelfth-century Europe had to Silicon Valley. The Church established Europe’s first economic corporations – the monasteries – which for 1,000 years spearheaded the European economy and introduced advanced agricultural and administrative methods.
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
To get her out of my bride’s way, who might otherwise walk over her rather too emphatically? There’s sense in the suggestion; not a doubt of it. Adèle, as you say, must go to school; and you, of course, must march straight to—the devil?” “I hope not, sir; but I must seek another situation somewhere.” “In course!” he exclaimed, with a twang of voice and a distortion of features equally fantastic and ludicrous. He looked at me some minutes. “And old Madam Reed, or the Misses, her daughters, will be solicited by you to seek a place, I suppose?” “No, sir; I am not on such terms with my relatives as would justify me in asking favours of them—but I shall advertise.” “You shall walk up the pyramids of Egypt!” he growled. “At your peril you advertise! I wish I had only offered you a sovereign instead of ten pounds. Give me back nine pounds, Jane; I’ve a use for it.” “And so have I, sir,” I returned, putting my hands and my purse behind me. “I could not spare the money on any account.” “Little niggard!” said he, “refusing me a pecuniary request! Give me five pounds, Jane.” “Not five shillings, sir; nor five pence.” “Just let me look at the cash.” “No, sir; you are not to be trusted.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
The Sumerian pantheon was headed by an "Olympian Circle" of twelve, for each of these supreme gods had to have a celestial counterpart, one of the twelve members of the Solar System. Indeed, the names of the gods and their planets were one and the same (except when a variety of epithets were used to describe the planet or the god's attributes). Heading the pantheon was the ruler of Nibiru, ANU whose name was synonymous with "Heaven," for he resided on Nibiru. His spouse, also a member of the Twelve, was called ANTU. Included in this group were the two principal sons of ANU: E.A ("Whose House Is Water"), Anu's Firstborn but not by Antu; and EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command") who was the Heir Apparent because his mother was Antu, a half sister of Anu. Ea was also called in Sumerian texts EN.KI ("Lord Earth"), for he had led the first mission of the Anunnaki from Nibiru to Earth and established on Earth their first colonies in the E.DIN ("Home of the Righteous Ones")—the biblical Eden. His mission was to obtain gold, for which Earth was a unique source. Not for ornamentation or because of vanity, but as away to save the atmosphere of Nibiru by suspending gold dust in that planet's stratosphere. As recorded in the Sumerian texts (and related by us in The 12th Planet and subsequent books of The Earth Chronicles), Enlil was sent to Earth to take over the command when the initial extraction methods used by Enki proved unsatisfactory. This laid the groundwork for an ongoing feud between the two half brothers and their descendants, a feud that led to Wars of the Gods; it ended with a peace treaty worked out by their sister Ninti (thereafter renamed Ninharsag). The inhabited Earth was divided between the warring clans. The three sons of Enlil—Ninurta, Sin, Adad—together with Sin's twin children, Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus), were given the lands of Shem and Japhet, the lands of the Semites and Indo-Europeans: Sin (the Moon) lowland Mesopotamia; Ninurta, ("Enlil's Warrior," Mars) the highlands of Elam and Assyria; Adad ("The Thunderer," Mercury) Asia Minor (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon. Ishtar was granted dominion as the goddess of the Indus Valley civilization; Shamash was given command of the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. This division, which did not go uncontested, gave Enki and his sons the lands of Ham—the brown/black people—of Africa: the civilization of the Nile Valley and the gold mines of southern and western Africa—a vital and cherished prize. A great scientist and metallurgist, Enki's Egyptian name was Ptah ("The Developer"; a title that translated into Hephaestus by the Greeks and Vulcan by the Romans). He shared the continent with his sons; among them was the firstborn MAR.DUK ("Son of the Bright Mound") whom the Egyptians called Ra, and NIN.GISH.ZI.DA ("Lord of the Tree of Life") whom the Egyptians called Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks)—a god of secret knowledge including astronomy, mathematics, and the building of pyramids. It was the knowledge imparted by this pantheon, the needs of the gods who had come to Earth, and the leadership of Thoth, that directed the African Olmecs and the bearded Near Easterners to the other side of the world. And having arrived in Mesoamerica on the Gulf coast—just as the Spaniards, aided by the same sea currents, did millennia later—they cut across the Mesoamerican isthmus at its narrowest neck and—just like the Spaniards due to the same geography—sailed down from the Pacific coast of Mesoamerica southward, to the lands of Central America and beyond. For that is where the gold was, in Spanish times and before.
Zecharia Sitchin (The Lost Realms (The Earth Chronicles, #4))
Just as it is commonly said that Asclepius has prescribed someone horse-riding, or cold baths, or walking barefoot, so we could say that the nature of the Whole has prescribed him disease, disablement, loss or any other such affliction. In the first case 'prescribed' means something like this: 'ordered this course for this person as conducive to his health'. In the second the meaning is that what happens to each individual is somehow arranged to conduce to his destiny. We speak of the fitness of these happenings as masons speak of the 'fit' of squared stones in walls or pyramids, when they join each other in a defined relation. In the whole of things there is one harmony: and just as all material bodies combine to make the world one body, a harmonious whole, so all causes combine to make Destiny one harmonious cause. Even quite unsophisticated people intuit what I mean. They say: 'Fate brought this on him.' Now if 'brought', also 'prescribed'. So let us accept these prescriptions just as we accept those of Asclepius- many of them too are harsh, but we welcome them in the hope of health. You should take the same view of the process and completion of the design of universal nature as you do of your own health: and so welcome all that happens to you, even if it seems rather cruel, because its purpose leads to the health of the universe and the prosperity and success of Zeus. He would not bring this on anyone, if it did not also bring advantage to the Whole: no more than any given natural principle brings anything inappropriate to what it governs. So there are two reasons why you should be content with your experience. One is that this has happened to you, was prescribed for you, and is related to you, a thread of destiny spun for you from the first by the most ancient causes. The second is that what comes to each individual is a determining part of the welfare, the perfection, and indeed the very coherence of that which governs the Whole. Because the complete Whole is maimed if you sever even the tiniest of its constituent parts, and true likewise of its causes. And you do sever something, to the extent that you can, whenever you fret at your lot: this is, in a sense, a destruction. p37
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
In 2001 Science featured an article, “The Soft Science of Dietary Fat,” that argued a low-fat diet is not necessarily healthful and that the public had been misled about the relative merits of fat and starch.16 A few years ago Scientific American declared: “It’s time to end the war on salt: the zealous drive by politicians to limit our salt intake has little basis in science.”17 About the same time the Department of Agriculture tossed out its iconic food pyramid for a food plate and juggled several of its recommendations.18 Recently the USDA was reported to be poised to recommend that Americans eat less meat—not because it’s better for individuals, but because it may be better for the environment, which indirectly could affect our health too.19
Michael J. Behe (Darwin Devolves : The New Science About DNA That Challenges Evolution)
Egypt: Old and Middle Kingdoms Roughly concurrent to the Early Dynastic period in Mesopotamia was the formative Old Kingdom period in Egypt, which permanently shaped Egypt both politically and culturally. This was the age of the great pyramids. During Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty, contemporary with the dynasty of Akkad in Mesopotamia, disintegration became evident. From the mid-twenty-second century BC until about 2000 BC, Egypt was plunged into a dark period known as the First Intermediate Period, which was characterized by disunity and at times by practical anarchy. Order was finally restored when Mentuhotep reunited Egypt, and Amenemhet I founded the Twelfth Dynasty, beginning a period of more than two centuries of prosperous growth and development. The Twelfth Dynasty developed extensive trade relations with Syro-Palestine and is the most likely period for initial contacts between Egypt and the Hebrew patriarchs. By the most conservative estimates, Sesostris III would have been the pharaoh who elevated Joseph to his high administrative post. Others are more inclined to place the emigration of the Israelites to Egypt during the time of the Hyksos. The Hyksos were Semitic peoples who began moving into Egypt (particularly the delta region in the north) as early as the First Intermediate Period. As the Thirteenth Dynasty ushered in a gradual decline, the reins of power eventually fell to the Hyksos (whether by conquest, coup or consent is still indeterminable), who then controlled Egypt from about the middle of the eighteenth century BC to the middle of the sixteenth century BC. It was during this time that the Israelites began to prosper and multiply in the delta region, waiting for the covenant promises to be fulfilled. ◆
Anonymous (NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture)
It is not coincidence that, as Raymond Money puts it, “from the pyramids of Egypt, the rebuilding of Rome after Nero’s fire, to the creation of the great medieval cathedrals…all great public works have been somehow associated with autocratic power.” It was no accident that most of the world’s great roads —ancient and modern alike—had been associated with totalitarian regimes, that it took a great Khan to build the great roads of Asia, a Darius to build the Royal Road across Asia Minor, a Hitler and a Mussolini to build the Autobahnen and autostrade of Europe, that during the four hundred years in which Rome was a republic it built relatively few major roads, its broad highways beginning to march across the known earth only after the decrees calling for their construction began to be sent forth from the Capitol by a Caesar rather than a Senate. Whether or not it is true, as Money claims, that “pure democracy has neither the imagination, nor the energy, nor the disciplined mentality to create major improvement,” it is indisputably true that it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to take the probably unpopular decision to allocate a disproportionate share of its resources to such improvements, far easier for it to mobilize the men necessary to plan and build them; the great highways of antiquity awaited the formation of regimes capable of assigning to their construction great masses of men ( Rome’s were built in large part by the legions who were to tramp along them); at times, the great highways of the modern age seemed to be awaiting some force capable of assigning to their planning the hundreds of engineers, architects and technicians necessary to plan them. And most important, it is far easier for a totalitarian regime to ignore the wishes of its people, for its power does not derive from the people. Under such a regime it is not necessary for masses of people to be persuaded of an improvement’s worth; the persuasion of a single mind is sufficient.
Robert A. Caro
working identity involves revisiting the basic assumptions we use to evaluate possibilities. To illustrate what basic assumptions are, it is useful to think of our career choices as a pyramid with three levels (see figure 4-1).4 At the top of the pyramid lies what is most visible, to us and to the outside world: what job we hold in what setting. Dan, for example, was an executive in a high-tech company. One level below are the values and motivating factors that hold constant from job to job and company to company. These are what MIT career specialist Edgar Schein calls our “career anchors,” the competencies, preferences, and work-related values that we would be unwilling to give up if forced to make a choice.5 Dan’s experience has led him to value himself professionally as someone who excels at turnarounds—at making troubled companies healthy. He could perform this role on a smaller or larger scale (for example, big company or small start-up), in an advisory or a hands-on role, and as a manager or an owner, but the constant is that managerial challenge is what excites him. Dan’s turmoil over the offer of a “perfect job” that would have again robbed him of his family time, however, belies a conflict between his professional and personal values that is rooted at a deeper level. In his search, therefore, he has to plumb deeper: He must explore the final, bottom level of the pyramid to understand the basic assumptions—our mental maps about how the world works—that truly drive his behavior.
Herminia Ibarra (Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career)
To avoid a misconception, it must be clarified that a world of steadily increasing wealth by no means ends human competition, and certainly does not bring about ‘brotherly love’ on earth. It is true that, when the most pressing human needs, the basic levels of what one author has described as the ‘pyramid of needs’, are met at a comfortable enough level -even more of less guaranteed- the impulse to use aggression to satisfy them weakens considerably. Studies indicate that people become more risk averse. Yet, as already explained in this book, human desires are open-ended, because people struggle to improve their relative position vis-à-vis others even in a situation of growing plenty.
Azar Gat (War in Human Civilization)
The Great Pyramid of Giza was designed in agreement with the Theory of General Relativity.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Calendar of Ancient Egypt: The Temporal Mechanics of the Giza Plateau)
Prahalad challenges readers to re-evaluate their pre-conceived notions about the commercial opportunities in serving the relatively poor nations of the world. The Bottom of the Pyramid highlights the way to commercial success and societal improvement.
Benedict Paramanand (CK Prahalad: The Mind of the Futurist - Rare Insights on Life, Leadership & Strategy)
Even the tail of the Sphinx is wrapped around its right hind paw signaling thereby the Earth's direction of rotation as we see with Menkaure's spatial lag (i.e., longitudinal and hence related to the Sunrise) in reference to the other two pyramids. With all other clues popping up in my research, this adds up to the evidence that there were a certain type of knowledge which the later generations of the ancient Egyptians were not aware of even though the structures and monuments of Egypt testified for its presence as we especially observe on the Sphinx. This is an unequivocal manifestation of the loss of that knowledge as a consequence of rebellion and revolution instead of uninterrupted inheritance and authentic tradition.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
People were selling pyramids of oranges from wooden carts. Powdered milk and sacks of grain sat on the shelves of the little stores we passed, the very food that little girl had needed to eat. It didn’t seem to make any sense, but famines are caused by shocks to the food distribution system, not necessarily by poverty per se. There was still plenty of food in Somalia; it was just relatively expensive because of the drought and the rise in global food prices.
Jeffrey Gettleman (Love, Africa: A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival)
What happens under the rule of specialization is that, though society becomes more and more intricate, it has less and less structure. It becomes more and more organized, but less and less orderly. The community disintegrates because it loses the necessary understandings, forms, and enactments of the relations among materials and processes, principles and actions, ideals and realities, past and present, present and future, men and women, body and spirit, city and country, civilization and wilderness, growth and decay, life and death - just as the individual character loses the sense of a responsible involvement in these relations. No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements decay the fields.
Wendell Berry
Now it is claimed that it is by means of the cycle of 25,868 years (the Sidereal year) that the approximate year of the erection of the Great Pyramid can be ascertained. "Assuming that the long narrow downward passage was directed towards the pole star of the pyramid builders, astronomers have shown that . . . . Alpha Draconis, the then pole-star, was in the required position about 3,350 B.C., as well as in 2,170 B.C. (Proctor, quoted by Staniland Wake.) But we are also told that "this relative position of Alpha Draconis and Alcyone being an extraordinary one . . it could not occur again for a whole sidereal year" (ibid). This demonstrates that, since the Dendera Zodiac shows the passage of three sidereal years, the great Pyramid must have been built 78,000 years ago, or in any case that this possibility deserves to be accepted at least as readily as the later date of 3,350 B.C. Now on the Zodiac of a certain temple in far
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine - Volume II, Anthropogenesis)
HONESTLY, CARTER IS SO THICK sometimes I can’t believe we’re related.
Rick Riordan (The Red Pyramid (Kane Chronicles, #1))
Plato considered the golden section proportion the most binding of all mathematical relations, making it the key to the physics of the cosmos.
Peter Tompkins (Secrets of the Great Pyramid: Two Thousand Years of Adventures & Discoveries Surrounding the Mysteries of the Great Pyramid of Cheops)
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation into a mere money relation. The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.
Karl Marx (The Communist Manifesto)
Nothing like watching you relatives fight!
Rick Riordan (Read Riordan: The Lightning Thief / The Lost Hero / The Red Pyramid / The Sword of Summer / The Hidden Oracle)
I’m teaching early modernist literature, and my students have all of these very bizarre moral reads on the books, which I believe comes from their native narrative intake, which is mostly all of these stupid fucking comic book movies.” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy,” said Moddie. “If you didn’t see Wonder Woman, I’m pretty sure you’re a rapist.” “Well, exactly!” said Peter. “Exactly. Well, film, but probably actually TV, has quite obviously replaced literature as the dominant narrative form. That’s not controversial, it’s just true. So now people are learning how to create narrative identity out of their own experiences using this model we see in film where good triumphs over evil. We see ourselves in the characters as good, and we internalize that to mean that we are good heroes and anything that upsets us or gets in the way of our heroic and constant ascent is evil. We don’t understand anything about the dark parts of our own nature. All of those parts are repressed, so of course, when we see those parts of ourselves expressed in another person, we attack. We vanquish the evil in ourselves by exerting control over others, through shaming, shunning, accusation, boycott. And this is the cultural norm right now, for some obvious and relatable reasons.” “Sure.” “In criticizing oversimplification and scapegoating, I’m not trying to oversimplify and create a new scapegoat. Some people and some actions should be condemned. Some things are objectively bad. But it’s gone too far, and when I see the Marvel Universe mind confronting the complexity of James—it’s wild. They get angry. So, I wanted to try to trace this narrative lineage back from Wonder Woman, for example, through Syd Field’s screenwriting books, Joseph Campbell—who was a Republican who fucked his students, if the author’s identity is important to you,” said Peter, raising and shaking his finger, “back in time to Freytag’s Pyramid, Debit and Credit, and this whole idea of the objectively perfect narrative form or structure, and how this entire notion, which has created the ‘new paradigm,’ ” Peter made a face, “of storytelling, is based on an intense philosophy of racial purity, is essentially propaganda, and is incredibly spiritually limiting, and the best thing we could do would be to become aware of exactly what it is we are consuming before we let it dictate our inner moral and aesthetic compasses.” Peter was very excited. “So, you wanted to do a lecture about how all of your students are fascists but don’t know it?” asked Moddie. Peter shrugged. “I was high.” “How did you imagine it would go?” asked Moddie. “Dead Poets Society.
Halle Butler (Banal Nightmare)
The second project is the support of crypto currency. Crypto is basically a pyramid scheme, with early investors dumping their tokens when the price rises. Professor Scott Galloway of New York University (named one of the Global Leaders of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum) has shown that the top 2 percent of accounts own 95 percent of the $800 billion supply of Bitcoin. In June 2022, a group of computer scientists and cryptographers wrote a letter to congressional leadership warning of the potential economic disaster crypto currencies may cause: “The catastrophes and externalities related to blockchain technologies and crypto-
Jonathan Taplin (The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto)