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.

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.

It is well to look around at whom, and not just what, surrounds us. Population structure will change everything. Our health, wealth, and peace depend on it.

The social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare; our lives can be greatly improved through a deeper understanding of individual and collective behavior. But to realize this promise, the social sciences, like the natural sciences, need to match their institutional structures to today's intellectual challenges.

What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions.

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.

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.