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

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.

We will create life from inanimate compounds, and we will find life in space. But the life that should more immediately interest us lies between these extremes, in the middle range we all inhabit between our genes and our stars.

People have just assumed that... if we call our Facebook acquaintances our friends, we must be influenced by them, too. But we're not.

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.

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.

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.