Erving Goffman Quotes

The only thing I learnt in high school is that people are very violent and territorial.

I distinctly remember being very young, sixth grade maybe, and being at a party and hearing the mothers discuss the children. And the mothers said, 'Well, it's very clear who's the leader in the group.' And they were talking about me!

Girls are not accustomed to jockeying for status in an obvious way; they are more concerned that they be liked.

The shoe is very much an X-ray of social comportment.

Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.

It's true; I'm fascinated by elite groups.

Our social life is literally primal, in the sense that chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest relatives among the primates, are also social.

Fashion is about what you look like, which translates to what you would like to be like.

I don't want to stay underground for just the cool people.

There's public humor, and there's private humor, and they're all appropriate in their own way, and you shouldn't - just as you wouldn't have a megaphone and say certain things that you would say around your friends - things that are perfectly all right within your close social group with whom you share a certain context.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

A lion is not a lion is not a lion. As individuals, as mates, as members of a society, they're all very different.

Dog parks are more cliquish than any other human gathering with the possible exception of seventh grade. Deal with it.

The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality.

If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing - the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.

America is a noisy culture, unlike, say, Finland, which values silence. Individualism, dominant in the U.S. and Germany, promotes the direct, fast-paced style of communication associated with extraversion. Collectivistic societies, such as those in East Asia, value privacy and restraint, qualities more characteristic of introverts.

Being put in a group, I hate that. I don't think anyone likes it. Everyone just wants to be their own person.

Actual human discourse happens within a number of contexts, not in some sort of unified public forum.

Identities reside in relations with others: you-me and us-them, and identities center on boundaries separating us from them.

People assume that I'm an aristocrat, but I don't really feel part of any class.

I went to Macalester in Minnesota to study social psychology, the study of why people do what they do. I was really looking at race, population, gender, and how we psychologically function in a way that affects our societal outcomes around those issues.

There is always a human being behind the titles and the status.

As social animals we humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive.

Egocentrism appears to us as a form of behavior intermediate between purely individual and socialized behavior.

I haven't noticed too much of a difference between Italian guys and American guys, but we're sports-entertainers so maybe they know to stand back a little!