Quotes about pyramid (118 quotes, page 2)

“Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids?”

Samuel Laman Blanchard (1804–1845) British author and journalist

"Quotations".
Sketches from Life (1846)
Context: Shall we not rejoice then and revel in the glorious liberty of extract, and quote to the thousandth line? Shall we not have pages like the Pyramids? Who ever skipped a quotation, though it made against the interest of the story? Besides, how many books might be numbered that are valuable only in a solitary quotation!—as the oyster is esteemed for the pearl it may sometimes contain.

Quotes

“The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation, may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand it on its point.”

James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine

The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish Character (1865)
Context: The student running over the records of other times finds certain salient things standing out in frightful prominence. He concludes that the substance of those times was made up of the matters most dwelt on by the annalist. He forgets that the things most noticed are not those of every-day experience, but the abnormal, the extraordinary, the monstrous. The exceptions are noted down, the common and usual is passed over in silence. The philosophic historian, studying hereafter this present age, in which we are ourselves living, may say that it was a time of unexampled prosperity, luxury, and wealth; but catching at certain horrible murders which have lately disgraced our civilisation, may call us a nation of assassins. It is to invert the pyramid and stand it on its point. The same system of belief which produced the tragedy which I have described, in its proper province as the guide of ordinary life, has been the immediate cause of all that is best and greatest in Scottish character.

Age , Study , Time , Wealth

“Follow the Nile
Deep to much deeper.
The Pyramids sound lonely tonight.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Never for Ever (1980)
Context: Follow the Nile
Deep to much deeper.
The Pyramids sound lonely tonight.
The sands run red
In lands of the Pharoahs.
Their symmetry gets right inside me.

“All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 43 (14 August 1750) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=Joh1Ram.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=43&division=div1
The Rambler (1750–1752)
Context: All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance: it is by this that the quarry becomes a pyramid, and that distant countries are united with canals. If a man was to compare the effect of a single stroke of the pick-axe, or of one impression of the spade, with the general design and last result, he would be overwhelmed by the sense of their disproportion; yet those petty operations, incessantly continued, in time surmount the greatest difficulties, and mountains are levelled, and oceans bounded, by the slender force of human beings.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that those, who have any intention of deviating from the beaten roads of life, and acquiring a reputation superior to names hourly swept away by time among the refuse of fame, should add to their reason, and their spirit, the power of persisting in their purposes; acquire the art of sapping what they cannot batter, and the habit of vanquishing obstinate resistance by obstinate attacks.

Art , Distant , Perseverance , Country

“The international community invested much effort and hope in the Reformists, but they’re pre-screened, pre-approved loyal opposition. More and more of their supporters are realizing it’s futile to promote change from within because Iran’s paramilitary mafia still occupy the top of the pyramid. Khamenei controls every apparatus of state: legislature, politics, information and military.”

Reza Pahlavi (1960) Last crown prince of the former Imperial State of Iran

As quoted in Cnaan Liphshiz. Obama ‘chickened out’ of confronting mullahs http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=272989. The Jerusalem Post. July 6, 2012.
Interviews, 2012

Hope , Communication , Support , Effort

“Some dog I got too. We call him Egypt. Because in every room he leaves a pyramid. ”

Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004) American actor and comedian

Dogs

“From the outside, the favela and everyone in it look the same, but there are various strata, and my family was one of those at the top of the pyramid…Below us were the garbage collectors, delivery boys and street vendors who made even less money than we did, and then those who were so poor that they never even left the favela and lived from odd jobs here and there.”

Paulo Lins (1958) Brazilian author

On where his family stood in the strata of the favelas in “THE SATURDAY PROFILE; Out of the Slums of Rio, an Author Finds Fame” https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/26/world/the-saturday-profile-out-of-the-slums-of-rio-an-author-finds-fame.html in The New York Times (2003 Apr 26)

Money , Family , Boy

“That day I learnt that in the big fat world of Bollywood, the problem isn’t whether the pyramid should be inverted or not. The problem is there isn’t any pyramid.”

Vivek Agnihotri (1973) director

Urban Naxals (2018)

World , Problem

“Owning your own racing ship wasn’t even wealth. It was like speciation. It was conspicuous consumption befitting ancient Earth royalty, a pharaoh’s pyramid with a reaction drive.”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

Source: Caliban's War (2012), Chapter 30 (p. 330)

Wealth , Relation ships

“I have not had an affair with Petronella. It is complete balderdash. It is an inverted pyramid of piffle.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

It is all completely untrue and ludicrous conjecture. I am amazed people can write this drivel.
Simon Walters, "Boris, Petsy and a 'pyramid of piffle'", Mail on Sunday, 7 November 2004, p. 7.
Denying accusations of his having an affair with Petronella Wyatt.
2000s, 2004

“There is neither private property, beyond personal belongings, now, nor buying and selling, and therefore the occasion of nearly all the legislation formerly necessary has passed away. Formerly, society was a pyramid poised on its apex. All the gravitations of human nature were constantly tending to topple it over, and it could be maintained upright, or rather upwrong (if you will pardon the feeble witticism), by an elaborate system of constantly renewed props and buttresses and guy-ropes in the form of laws. A central Congress and forty state legislatures, turning out some twenty thousand laws a year, could not make new props fast enough to take the place of those which were constantly breaking down or becoming ineffectual through some shifting of the strain. Now society rests on its base, and is in as little need of artificial supports as the everlasting hills.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 19

Law , Support , Personality , Nature

“The years passed, and sometimes just before I … I awoke, I’d hear music going on inside my head. I’d lie perfectly still, not moving, not waking, and the music would spread all through my body, just as it had done at the pyramids outside Mexico City. Finally I’d leap out of bed and start writing like a madman. Ten, twelve, fifteen hours a day. It was just pouring out of me. It was limitless!”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

Crazy Loco Love: A Memoir (2008)

Music , Lie

“Search not to find what lies too deeply hid,
Nor to know things whose knowledge is forbid;
Nor climb on pyramids, which thy head turn round
Standing, and whence no safe descent is found.”

John Denham (1615–1669) English poet and courtier

Source: Of Prudence (1668), line 231

Knowledge , Search

“The pyramids of Giza were as old to the ancient Romans, as the ancient Romans are to us.”

Michael Stevens (educator) (1986) Internet personality

"Our Narrow Slice", Vsauce (8 October 2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNLdblFQqsw

“For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species, in spite of of plague and war, the latter seeming the ultimately ironic kind of self-serving apocalypse showing the absolute idiocy of the human being the pinnacle of the pyramid of life. While the earth is in the grip of the apocalypse the anthropocene delivers, humans fear an apocalypse that our consumerism, our greed and our narcissism welcomes.”

Patricia MacCormack Australian Scholar

Future in the Age of the Apocalypse, pp. 176-177
The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (2020)

Life , War , Personality , Self-confidence

“When the police enforce the law, they do so unevenly, in ways that give disproportionate attention to the activities of poor people, people of color, and others near the bottom of the social pyramid. And when the police violate the law, these same people are their most frequent victims.”

Kristian Williams (1974) American historian

at the bottom. Put differently, we might say that the police act to defend the interests and standing of those with power—those at the top. So long as they serve in this role, they are likely to be given a free hand in pursuing these ends and a great deal of leeway in pursuing other ends that they identify for themselves. The laws may say otherwise, but laws can be ignored.
Rights, riots and police brutality, 2020

Way , People , Color , Law

“Without ideality, there is no grandeur; without grandeur there is no beauty. Olympus is a mountain. The most effective monument will always be the Pyramids. Exuberance is better than taste; the desert is better than a streetpavement, and a savage is surely better than a hairdresser!”

Gustave Flaubert book Sentimental Education

Source: Sentimental Education (1869), Pt. 1, Ch. 4; the most famous portion of this statement is "Exuberance is better than taste..." [Mieux vaut l'exubérance que le goût.]

Mountain , Beauty

“Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents... The whole blueprint of school procedure is Egyptian, not Greek or Roman. It grows from the theological idea that human value is a scarce thing, represented symbolically by the narrow peak of a pyramid.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935–2018) American teacher, book author

Source: "I Quit, I Think" (1991)

Childhood , Home , History , Idea

Quotes about pyramid page 2

Quotes about pyramid
page 2