nexus QUOTES

1 " We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world. "

― Terence McKenna

2 " Funny is like sexy, and they are kind of related. What turns one person on is hilarious to another person. And vice versa. And you can see all of this at the nexus of clowns. Many people think clowns are hilarious. (Many others think clowns are creepy.) But there is a certain percentage of people who think clowns are sexy. Don't believe me, Google " clown porn" right now. I dare you. And if you don't need to Google that, then it's because it is already saved on your browser. So when these dudes say, " Women aren't funny," they are forgetting a classically important addendum: " to me." They should be saying, " Women aren't funny to me." But they don't say " to me" because if you are a man in America, you are considered the norm. (Remember it's the NBA and the W[omen's]NBA, not the WNBA and the M[en's]NBA.) And if you are a white man in America, then you are also considered the norm. "

3 " Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.
A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators.
Fear spawns in the body, phonologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a “runaway” of terror. Put the body into a state of phobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow. "

― Steven Pressfield , Gates of Fire

4 " The winds of potential change blow constantly through our existence altering potentialities until a tipping point or nexus shakes our thread into a different weave, a new existence. It is our pattern-sensing consciousnesses that tricks us into believing remaining static is an option, that this day is like the next or the one before, as if the chaos that change will inevitably bring can be avoided. It's a comforting lie . . . "

― Larry J. Dunlap , Night People (Things We Lost in the Night, #1)

5 " Spinoza was the supreme rationalist. He saw an endless stream of causality in the world. For him there is no such entity as will or will power. Nothing happens capriciously. Everything is caused by something prior, and the more we devote ourselves to the understanding of this causative network, the more free we become." ... " I'm sure he would have said that you are subject to passions that are driven by inadequate ideas rather than by the ideas that flow from a true quest for understanding the nature of reality." ... " He states explicitly that a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a more clear and distinct idea of it--that is, the causative nexus underlying the passion." p.269 "

6 " Belief in the causal nexus is superstition. "

― Ludwig Wittgenstein , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

7 " Debt . . . . that peculiar nexus where money, narrative or story, and religious belief intersect, often with explosive force. "

― Margaret Atwood , Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

8 " Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent. "

― Andrew Solomon

9 " The space between the private and the public is the nexus of the personal and the social, if not political. It’s where we meet the strong or subtle cultural censors who attempt to define what community, race, class, or gender can or cannot speak, to tell us which stories are told and valued and which are not. In short, it’s where we’re reminded of the power of personal stories and the power of the storyteller. "

― , Living Proof: Telling Your Story to Make a Difference (Expanded)

10 " The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors,' and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous 'cash payment.' It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. "

― Karl Marx , The Communist Manifesto

11 " Brainstorming is the nexus of ideas. "

― Asa Don Brown , Interpersonal Skills in the Workplace, Finding Solutions that Work

12 " Through their donations and work for voluntary organizations, the charitable rich exert enormous influence in society. As philanthropists, they acquire status within and outside of their class. Although private wealth is the basis of the hegemony of this group, philanthropy is essential to the maintenance and perpetuation of the upper class in the United States. In this sense, nonprofit activities are the nexus of a modern power elite. "

― ,

13 " New York was no mere city. It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself. "