Helen Fisher Quotes

We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.

Just looking at society as a whole, there are a lot of different things that we are not doing as a group to make sure we are close. Everything is in transit. People are moving from place to place. You can have a neighbor you live next to for five years and never speak to, and nobody has a problem with that.

Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.

People lived in the same apartments for years. You'd meet a group of kids in kindergarten, and you'd still be with them in high school. No one ever left the neighborhood.

It used to be that you knew your neighbors and maybe your coworkers - the people in your physical vicinity.

When I was on Taransay, I loved being part of a community, I loved that everyone knew what I was doing, where I was going. I loved that. I liked knowing that if I wasn't back at a certain time people would start worrying a little bit about me, I loved the whole community thing, sitting for hours and chatting to people.

Strangers are an endangered species.

Competitive individualism militates against the experience of community, and that lack of community is a centrally important factor in contemporaneous anxiety.

Rather than bringing me closer to others, the time that I spend online isolates me from the most important people in my life, my family, my friends, my neighbourhood, my community.

If you look at the literature of the 19th century, you get things like Kafka and Dostoevsky, who basically write about feeling bored and alienated. That's because we lost contact with the important things in life like work that you enjoy, or the garden, nature, your family and friends.

The local community is very important in one's life; the feelings of identification with a place and people.

One thing about living in a small town, I knew everybody and everybody knew me.

If we reduce social life to the smallest possible unit we will find that there is no social life in the company of one.

Our society is not a community, but merely a collection of isolated family units.

For too long in this society, we have celebrated unrestrained individualism over common community.

In the not so distant past, we were close enough to our community to physically see how our actions impacted the group overall. Now it's just too easy to look the other way, or turn off the TV or computer and detach ourselves from the others.

I like the fact that Austin's the first place I've ever lived where there's a real sense of community. People care about their neighbors.

Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.

Tulsa was the kind of place where you could go to any door and borrow a cup of sugar. Everybody knew everybody. Truthfully, I don't even remember dealing with any racism in our town; we all got along.

There are aspects of small town life that I really like - the routine nature of it, the idea of people knowing you and your likes and dislikes.

The personal contact is a personal thing. The fact that some people don't know their neighbors, I don't think that technology is at fault. You don't lose anything with technology. You gain other avenues of understanding.

The average Londoner knows just one neighbour. I travel a lot, and I'm always surprised by the strong sense of community in some countries. We've lost something fundamentally human, and we don't even realise it.

I loved growing up in a little town. I loved knowing people. I loved going to the store and running into people. I loved going into the store and having forgotten my bag, saying, 'Charge it, put it on my bill.' I loved going to the gas station and saying, 'Pete, fill it up.' I loved that continuity of life.

I grew up in north Norfolk, which certainly used to have an enormous sense of community. There are more and more second homes there now, so I'm not sure how that has damaged it. But where I live in South London, there is a beautiful community; it's the friendliest place I have ever lived, which comes as a surprise to non-Londoners.

Civil society begins with the family.