Reid Hoffman Quotes

No one acts or experiences in a vacuum.

The environment shapes people's actions.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

We're all about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, et cetera - I think that's a harmful mythology, that the choices that we make and the things that we do in our lives are not connected to anything else. So I'd like to help to debunk that.

We are always influenced because we do not live in a vacuum together with our intentions. We are in a relationship with everything that occurs.

The nervous system of any age or nation is its creative workers, its artists. And if that nervous system is profoundly disturbed by its environment, the work it produces will inescapably reflect the disturbances, sometimes obliquely and sometimes with violent directness.

Environments are the messages before the message.

The difference between a serial killer and a saint is environment. That's a very hard thing to accept because that raises a lot of questions

You are not the same person working alone as you are in a group; in a romantic setting versus an educational one; when you are with close friends or in an anonymous crowd; or when you are traveling abroad as when at home base.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

Our history is a passion for me. I feel that we leave out so much information and huge gaps in the American story and it makes it hard for people to really understand that we are all intricately related as Americans. So I am attracted to historically based projects because we entertain and learn something at the same time. I just love that combination.

We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

I don't think you can escape the environment we live in now.

But there are no loners. No man lives in a void. His every act is conditioned by his time and his society.

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever

In my opinion when you speak about relationships between people, you are actually talking about everything in their world because everything is contained in that relationship.

We tend to take on the coloration of the setting in which we find ourselves.

There's nothing that you like in this world that wasn't influenced by a bunch of key things; nothing came completely clean out of a vacuum.

No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.

Don't change the man. Change his environment.

Society is not just the product of its individual members; it is also the product of its constituent groups.

People are fundamentally good. But conditions deteriorate them.

The fundamental thing is to drop the split, to become one. Be one, and then all else is possible; even the impossible is possible.

And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise. Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister's story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.