Top 100 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes
#2. It's challenging, it's not hopeless. You have to come up with something. You have to figure out a way to help them, because people must have hope to live.
Malcolm Gladwell
#3. In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more - which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less.
Malcolm Gladwell
#4. The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.
Malcolm Gladwell
#5. Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?
Malcolm Gladwell
#7. What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.
Malcolm Gladwell
#8. Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if they added 15% more yellow coloring TO THE PACKAGE.
Malcolm Gladwell
#9. If people disobey, don't ask what is wrong with them, ask what's wrong with their leaders.
Malcolm Gladwell
#10. There's this powerful phrase in the legal world, "Difficult cases make bad law." The exception is the difficult case. You can't generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don't solve any problem because they're so one of a kind.
Malcolm Gladwell
#11. An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
Malcolm Gladwell
#12. When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.
Malcolm Gladwell
#13. Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the
Malcolm Gladwell
#14. Our acquaintances - not our friends - are our greatest source of new ideas and information. the internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency.
Malcolm Gladwell
#15. When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not exercise. It's in society's interest for me to take the stairs.
Malcolm Gladwell
#16. I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.
Malcolm Gladwell
#17. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.(p.115)
Malcolm Gladwell
#18. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.
Malcolm Gladwell
#19. I think that persistence and stubbornness and hard work are probably, at the end of the day, more important than the willingness to take a risk.
Malcolm Gladwell
#20. But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that's exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.
Malcolm Gladwell
#21. There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.
Malcolm Gladwell
#22. Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you're smarter than you were before.
Malcolm Gladwell
#23. The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.
Malcolm Gladwell
#24. Power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.
Malcolm Gladwell
#25. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.
Malcolm Gladwell
#26. You have to be outside the establishment - a foreigner new to the game
Malcolm Gladwell
#27. Anyone who has ever scanned the bookshelves of a new girlfriend or boyfriend- or peeked inside his or her medicine cabinet- understands this implicitly; you can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.
Malcolm Gladwell
#28. My rule is that if I interview someone, they should never read what I have to say about them and regret having given me the interview.
Malcolm Gladwell
#29. Extraordinary achievement is less about talent than it is about opportunity.
Malcolm Gladwell
#30. Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled.
Malcolm Gladwell
#31. We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.
Malcolm Gladwell
#32. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.
Malcolm Gladwell
#33. from centuries past, as well as contemporary billionaires, such
Malcolm Gladwell
#35. Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.
Malcolm Gladwell
#37. The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.
Malcolm Gladwell
#38. Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.
Malcolm Gladwell
#39. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it.
Malcolm Gladwell
#40. Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom.
Malcolm Gladwell
#41. The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.
Malcolm Gladwell
#42. Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.
Malcolm Gladwell
#43. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not, With the slightest push - in just the right place - it can be tipped.
Malcolm Gladwell
#44. Gosh darn it," Gau said, "if you don't try, you'll never succeed." 10.
Malcolm Gladwell
#45. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.
Malcolm Gladwell
#46. That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren't much good until late in their careers.
Malcolm Gladwell
#47. The first person who throws the rock is a lot more radical than a hundredth person.By the time the riot has attracted a hundred people, you don't have to be nearly as much of a daredevil or a hothead or committed or any of those things to want to engage in a riot.
Malcolm Gladwell
#48. The closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Malcolm Gladwell
#49. What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
Malcolm Gladwell
#51. If you're in business it's both a promise and a warning. It says that sometimes little things can cause some little guy to have an overnight success.
Malcolm Gladwell
#52. Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.
Malcolm Gladwell
#53. There is an important idea in psychology: The 'just world theory,' which says that it is very important for us to convince ourselves that the world is just and things happen for a reason. That there is some elemental fairness in everything, which creates the illusion of justice.
Malcolm Gladwell
#54. Before the Memorial Cup final, Gord Wasden - the father of one of the Medicine Hat Tigers - stood
Malcolm Gladwell
#55. But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries - all Goliaths - too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.
Malcolm Gladwell
#57. We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean
Malcolm Gladwell
#58. Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.
Malcolm Gladwell
#59. run up the hillside, flanked by closely clustered two-story
Malcolm Gladwell
#60. Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.
Malcolm Gladwell
#61. What track needs to figure out: how to engage us between the races. Instead, the entire off-the-track conversation is about doping. This is how you kill a sport.
Malcolm Gladwell
#62. Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.
Malcolm Gladwell
#63. If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!
Malcolm Gladwell
#64. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that - sometimes - we're better off that way. 1.
Malcolm Gladwell
#65. When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters - first and foremost - how they behave.
Malcolm Gladwell
#66. The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly.
Malcolm Gladwell
#67. What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.
Malcolm Gladwell
#68. But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.
Malcolm Gladwell
#69. And do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the Internet? Bill Joy.
Malcolm Gladwell
#70. That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
Malcolm Gladwell
#71. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness. David understood that, as he sized up his opponent long ago in the Valley of Elah. And in a different time and in a very different age,
Malcolm Gladwell
#72. We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds.
Malcolm Gladwell
#73. The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.
Malcolm Gladwell
#74. What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter. Think back to Alex Williams, the nine-year-old whom Annette Lareau studied.
Malcolm Gladwell
#76. So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.
Malcolm Gladwell
#78. Hey, say you are looking at a chess board. Is there anything you can't see? No. But are you guaranteed to win? Not at all, because you can't see what the other guy is thinking.
Malcolm Gladwell
#80. Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.
Malcolm Gladwell
#81. One harder than the one before it, and IQ is calculated based
Malcolm Gladwell
#82. Being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience
Malcolm Gladwell
#83. Our power of thin-slicing and snap judgment are extraordinary.but even the giant computer in our unconscious need a moment to do its work.
Malcolm Gladwell
#85. All positive traits, states, and experiences have costs that at high levels may begin to outweigh their benefits.
Malcolm Gladwell
#86. Our unconscious is really good at quick decision-making - it often delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.
Malcolm Gladwell
#87. Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.
Malcolm Gladwell
#88. The issue isn't the accuracy of the bombs you have, it's how you use the bombs you have - and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all.
Malcolm Gladwell
#89. You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
#90. Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation
Malcolm Gladwell
#91. I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.
Malcolm Gladwell
#93. I recently talked to an eighteen-year-old - a huge FIFA fan - and realized that he spends more time playing the FIFA video game than he does watching actual FIFA games.
Malcolm Gladwell
#94. Just dumb enough to be fearless, just bright enough to be dangerous,
Malcolm Gladwell
#95. Come to me, that I may give your flesh to the birds of the heavens and the beasts of the field,
Malcolm Gladwell
#96. What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place.
Malcolm Gladwell
#97. I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.
Malcolm Gladwell
#98. As it may be - matters. How you feel about your abilities - your academic "self-concept" - in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It's a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.
Malcolm Gladwell
#99. They lacked something that could have been given to them if we'd only known they needed it: a community around them that prepared them properly for the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
#100. If we want to, say, develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighborhoods, this tells us that we're probably better off building lots of little schools than one or two big ones.
Malcolm Gladwell
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