Graham Hancock Quotes

“All politicians should be required to drink Ayahuasca 10 times before taking office.”

“Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today.”

“Do we as adults have the right to make decisions about what we put in our own bodies and what we experience with our own consciousness without reference to the powers of the state, or must we seek permission from the state in order to explore our own consciousness?”

“Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.”

“I believe we are a species with amnesia, I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. I think we are quite lost in many ways. And we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. A society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers or products and not really asking any of the questions.”

“I don't believe that consciousness is generated by the brain. I believe that the brain is more of a reciever of consciousness.”

“I see myself as a journalist reporting neglected stories about our past and trying to bring rigor, reason and intuition to the quest.”

“I think it's obvious that the psychedelics are demonized and illegalized by our society because somewhere in our society are controlling minds that realize that these substances have the potential, have the power to unpick the controlling hierarchy.”

“If this is how science operates, by silencing those who express opposing views rather than by debating with them, then science is dead and we are in a new era of the Inquisition.”

“It may be that DMT makes us able to perceive what the physicist call 'dark matter' – the 95 percent of the universe's mass that is known to exist but that at present remains invisible to our senses and instruments.”

“Just plain logic says that the war on drugs does not work. It absolutely does not work. We have this highly addictive legal drug called tobacco which has never resulted in people being sent to prison, but there has been a massive reduction in its consumption simply because responsible adults looking at their own bodies have said they don't want to do that to themselves.”

“My sense is that we are missing a huge part of the human story. I think it's possible, indeed probable, that we are a species with amnesia; that we've lost the record of our story going back thousands of years before so-called history began, and I think that if we could go back to that dark epoch, we would discover many astounding things about ourselves.”

“Our society values alert, problem-solving consciousness, and it devalues all other states of consciousness. Any kind of consciousness that is not related to the production or consumption of material goods is stigmatized in our society today. Of course we accept drunkenness. We allow people some brief respite from the material grind. A society that subscribes to that model is a society that is going to condemn the states of consciousness that have nothing to do with the alert problem-solving mentality.”

“People think I'm a freemason, and I'm not. People think I believe the end of the world is coming on 21 December 2012, and I don't.”

“Science has often resisted new ideas and fought bitterly to prevent them coming on board.”

“There are all kinds of ways to challenge ourselves. Some people do it by climbing a mountain or scuba diving. The most profound and challenging ordeals is to drink Ayahuasca. It is in a way the ultimate adventure.”

“This beautiful Earth that we have, this gift that the Universe has given us is precious beyond measure, precious beyond imagination, and we are part of it and we must treat it with Love, respect, and reverence.”

“We live in a society that will send us to prison if we make use of time-honored sacred plants to explore our own consciousness. Yet surely the exploration and expansion of the miracle of our consciousness is the essence of what it is to be human? By demonstrating and persecuting whole areas of consciousness, we may be denying ourselves the next vital step in our own evolution.”

“You have to understand that we've had more than 40 years now of massively financed propaganda called the 'War on Drugs'.”

“Ancient Egypt, like that of the Olmecs in Bolivia, emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society appears to have been so short that it makes no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve were brought into use almost overnight – and with no apparent antecedents whatever.

For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period around 3500 BC show no trace of writing. Soon after that date, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of Ancient Egypt begin to appear in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured at the outset, with signs that represented sounds only and a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were stylized and conventionalized; and it is clear that an advanced cursive script was it common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.”

“Bauval found that the Pyramids/Orion’s Belt correlation was general and obvious in all epochs, but specific and exact in only one: At 10,450 BC – and at that date only – we find that the pattern of the pyramids on the ground provides a perfect reflection of the pattern of the stars in the sky. I mean it’s a perfect match – faultless – and it cannot be an accident because the entire arrangement correctly depicts two very unusual celestial events that occurred only at that time.

First, and purely by chance, the Milky Way, as visible from Giza in 10,450 BC, exactly duplicated the meridional course of the Nile Valley; secondly, to the west of the Milky Way, the three stars of Orion’s Belt were at the lowest altitude in their precessional cycle, with Al Nitak, the star represented by the Great Pyramid, crossing the meridian at 11° 08ʹ.8.”

“Geography is about maps, and astronomy is about stars. Very often the two disciplines go hand in hand because stars are essential for navigation on long sea-going voyages of discovery (and long sea-going voyages of discovery are essential for the production of accurate maps). Is it accidental that the First Men of the Popol Vuh were remembered not only for studying 'the round face of the earth' but for their contemplation of 'the arch of heaven'?”

“Not for the first time I felt myself confronted by the dizzying possibility that an entire episode in the story of mankind might have been forgotten. Indeed it seemed to me then, as I overlooked the mathematical city of the gods from the summit of the Pyramid of the Moon, that our species could have been afflicted with some terrible amnesia and that the dark period so blithely and dismissively referred to as 'prehistory' might turn out to conceal unimagined truths about our own past.”

“The god believed by the Ancient Egyptians to have taught the principles of astronomy to their ancestors was Thoth: He who reckons in heaven, the counter of the stars, the enumerator of the earth and of what is
therein, and the measurer of the Earth.”

“The Julian calendar computed the period of the earth’s orbit around the sun at 365.25 days. Pope Gregory XIII’s reform substituted a finer and more accurate calculation: 365.2425 days. Thanks to scientific advances since 1582 we now know that the exact length of the solar year is 365.2422 days.”

“The majority of Egyptologists will not consider the implications of Egypt's early sophistication. These implications are startling, according to a number of more daring thinkers.

John Anthony West, an expert on the early dynastic period, asks: 'How does a complex civilization spring full-blown into being?' Look at a 1905 automobile and compare it to a modern one. There is no mistaking the process of 'development'. But in Egypt there are no parallels. Everything is right there at the start. The answer to the mystery is of course obvious but, because it is repellent to the prevailing cast of modern thinking, it is seldom considered. Egyptian civilization was not a 'development', it was a legacy.”

“The Maya knew the time taken by the moon to orbit the Earth. Their estimate of this period was 29.528395 days – extremely close to the true figure of 29.530588 days computed by the finest modern methods.

The Mayan priests also had in their possession very accurate tables for the prediction of solar and lunar eclipses and were aware that these could occur only within plus or minus eighteen days of the node (when the moon’s path crosses the apparent path of the sun).”

“The Olmecs had worked out the principle of the wheel.”

“What is prehistory, after all, if not a time forgotten – a time for which we have no records? What is prehistory if not an epoch of impenetrable obscurity through which our ancestors passed but about which we have no conscious remembrance?

It was out of this epoch of obscurity, configured in mathematical code along astronomical and geodetic lines, that Teotihuacan with all its riddles was sent down to us. And out of that same epoch came the great Olmec sculptures, the inexplicably precise and accurate calendar the Mayans inherited from their predecessors, the inscrutable geoglyphs of Nazca, the mysterious Andean city of Tiahuanaco and so many other marvels of which we do not know the provenance.

It is almost as though we have awakened into the daylight of history from a long and troubled sleep, and yet continue to be disturbed by the faint but haunting echoes of our dreams.”

“What is remarkable is that there are no traces of evolution from simple to sophisticated, and the same is true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture and of Egypt's amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even the central content of such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period).”