p.1 Nothing is more familiar to men than their ordinary, everyday social behavior; and should a sociologist make any generalization about it, he runs the risk that his readers will find him wrong at the first word and cut him off without a hearing... Every man has thought about it, and mankind through the centuries has embodied the more satisfactory of the generalizations in proverbs and maxims about social behavior, what it is and what it ought to be... What makes the subject of everyday social behavior a chaos is that each of these maxims and proverbs, while telling an important part of the truth, never tells it all, and nobody tries to put them together.

p.3 Much social science is rightly devoted to explaining why the rules are what they are... this book... will try to explain the actual behavior. Its subject matter is, then, the actual social behavior of individuals in direct contact with one another.

p.11 this book... will state a number of general propositions of the general form "x varies as y" about elementary social behavior

p.13 the set of general propositions I shall use in this book envisages social behavior as an exchange of activity, tangible or intangible, and more or less rewarding or costly, between at least two persons.

p.81 All the good advice... that wise men give their fellows is meant to change behavior and not to explain it... The advice tries to answer the question: Given that you value the attainment of certain ends, how could you have acted so as to attain them more effectively?

p.85 There are few things that men have more personal experience with than trying to influence people.

p.131 competition... the two men... each emits activity that, so far as it is rewarded, tends by that fact to deny reward to the other.

p.131 The competition, as in many games, may be interesting enough in itself to provide rewards that outweigh the costs of losing.

p.365 Social behavior is an exchange of more or less valuable rewards.

p.391-392 Exchange - it has been our main theme - is the basis, acknowledged or unacknowledged, of much human behavior