A Quote by Kendrick Lamar

I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs — © Kendrick Lamar
I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
Build your own pyramids, write your own hieroglyphs.
Pygmies are pygmies still, though percht on Alps; And pyramids are pyramids in vales. Each man makes his own stature, builds himself. Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids; Her monuments shall last when Egypt's fall.
His foreparents came to America in immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America in slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we are both in the same boat tonight.
They say the Pharaohs built the pyramids Do you think one Pharaoh dropped one bead of sweat? We built the pyramids for the Pharaohs and we're building for them yet.
I was in Los Angeles. I saw the biggest ships you have ever seen with cars pouring off from Japan, into Los Angeles. Just pouring off these ships, and I am saying to myself, we send them beef, it's a tiny fraction, and, by the way, they don't even want it, they have to fight in order to take it in because they don't even want it, and it's very perishable, they'll send it back, they'll find reasons not to take it. And yet the ships, the boats, the ships are loaded up with cars, thousands of cars and they are just pouring off.
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.
I maintain my conviction that there are NO pyramids at Visoko, Bosnia. Rather, all the so-called pyramids are the result of natural geological processes and phenomena that are currently being 'excavated' (i.e., modified) to look like pyramids.
The difference between the Pyramids in Egypt and the ones in Mexico is there is nothing inside the Mexican Pyramids. In the African Pyramids, the whole inside is a burial chamber. So they were really gravesites to nobility.
Here in the United States, hopefully, what we're building are not just pyramids, are not icons to one pharaoh. What we're building is a culture and a way of living together that we can look back on and say, [This] was good, was inclusive, was kind, was innovative, was able to fulfill the dreams of as many people as possible.
People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Writing in the voice of an American slave felt like I was biting off something very large.
I'll stick to building ships.
I've always said if I could own one piece it would be Vermeer's The Love Letter, and if I could put it anywhere it would be in a David Chipperfield building. I'm almost there with the building - Chipperfield is building a new house for me in London. The Vermeer is a long way off.
When the Egyptians were building the pyramids or the Romans were building roads, or you had the westward push with the railroads, I don't think that the guys on the ground were spending a lot of time thinking, 'Hey, hundreds or thousands of years from now they will look back at the brick I have just laid down here and say that I changed the world!'
Ancient astronauts didn't build the pyramids. Human beings built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard.
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