Nicholas A. Christakis Quotes

You can't really divorce yourself and your life from the world you live in.

There are very fundamental reasons we live our lives in social networks, and if we really understood the role they're playing in our society, we would take better care of social networks and find ways to take advantage of their power to improve our society.

All animals communicate. What's special about gossip is that it's not about the here and now. You don't gossip about lions. You don't gossip about clouds. You only gossip about other people. And once you do, you can keep track of many more people - this is the basis for forming larger communities.

A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before.

We're not just social animals in the conventional way that people think. It's not just a bunch of us who hang out together. We have a very specific pattern of ties, and they have a particular shape and structure that is encoded in our genes. It means that human beings have evolved to live their lives embedded in social networks.

The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities. A life is beautiful and ideal or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.

Connections with other people affect not only the quality of our lives but also our survival.

My students often ask me, 'What is sociology?' And I tell them, 'It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see.'

I started out in anthropology, so to me how society works, how people put themselves together and make things work, has always been a big interest.

Some would argue that you're as successful as the company you keep. Certainly there is a connection between our friends and who we are.

It has often struck me that the relation of two important members of the social body to one another has never been sufficiently considered, or treated of, so far as I know, either by the philosopher or the poet.

Religion is not man's relationship to God, it is man's relationship to man.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

I connect with just plain old everyday people. Human behavior fascinates me, the people who are the nuts and bolts of this country who help hold up the world.

I feel 'The Street' is a really accurate comment on the relationships between people.

Coming out of university, one of my obsessions was that in the novels I was reading, they seemed to be portraying a world that had a social fabric. People knew each other in 'War and Peace.' They went to all the same balls. These were societies with tightly wound, woven, social textures.

I was always pretty popular, just cool with everybody.

Our lives are slowly but surely becoming connected to each other.

Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect.

We never know how our small activities will affect others through the invisible fabric of our connectedness. In this exquisitely connected world, it's never a question of 'critical mass.' It's always about critical connections.

We all act as hinges-fortuitous links between other people.

You are who you go to lunch with! Break bread with cool and you will become more cool. Conversely: break bread with dull and well, you can figure it out.

Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse, and all the institutions of society fly into atoms.