42 Quotes by Nicholas A. Christakis

My entire youth was spent with an incredibly ill parent... I don't think you can grow up that way and not be marked by that experience.

Social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous that one has to ask what purpose they serve.

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.

Whether we appreciate it or not, we live out our lives surrounded by an intricate pattern of social connections... We're all embedded in this network; it affects us profoundly and we may be unaware of its existence, of its effect on us.

The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It's to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.

Just because we say networks are important doesn't mean that networks explain everything. We're just adding additional information. Networks don't work like a match - they work like a magnifying glass.

I like to have met someone in real life before being their Facebook friend.

It's fashionable to speak about vulnerable populations in medicine and public policy, but it's harder to find a more vulnerable population than those who are dying.

Realizing the ways in which we humans may have been inadvertently changing our genes for millennia provides a way for us to begin to think about the inevitable genetic revolution in medicine that is going to allow us to advertently change our genes over centuries and even decades.