Top 100 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes
#1. Malcolm Gladwell puts the "pop" in pop psychology, and although revered in lay circles, is roundly dismissed by experts - even by the researchers he makes famous.
Paul Gibbons
#2. Malcolm Gladwell, the author and New Yorker writer, has suggested that as a society we value natural, effortless accomplishment over achievement through effort. We endow our heroes with superhuman abilities that led them inevitably toward their greatness.
Carol S. Dweck
#3. Author Malcolm Gladwell believes that one can be an expert at something after putting in ten thousand hours of practice.
Anonymous
#4. Malcolm Gladwell can't help being a pinhead. He was probably born that way.
Gregory Cochran
#5. Because the people and countries who are wealthy enough to pay for things like really small classes have a hard time understanding that the things their wealth can buy might not always make them better off.
Malcolm Gladwell
#6. They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten. Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.
Malcolm Gladwell
#10. But MacCurdy's idea about near and remote misses suggests something quite different - that courage is in some sense acquired.
Malcolm Gladwell
#11. The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all.
Malcolm Gladwell
#12. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.
Malcolm Gladwell
#13. The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.
Malcolm Gladwell
#14. Away from or classed differently from a main or related body 2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample 1.
Malcolm Gladwell
#15. If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires. (151)
Malcolm Gladwell
#16. Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment. This
Malcolm Gladwell
#17. Sesame Street succeeded because it learned how to make television sticky.
Malcolm Gladwell
#18. Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.
Malcolm Gladwell
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions ... by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.
Malcolm Gladwell
#22. 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
#23. We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.
Malcolm Gladwell
#24. All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.
Malcolm Gladwell
#25. Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.
Malcolm Gladwell
#26. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.
Malcolm Gladwell
#28. If we can control the environment in which rapid cognition takes place, then we can control rapid cognition
Malcolm Gladwell
#29. The sad thing about doping is how much it obscures our appreciation of greatness.
Malcolm Gladwell
#30. Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn't listening to you, that he's talking down to you, and that he isn't treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.
Malcolm Gladwell
#31. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.
Malcolm Gladwell
#32. Rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.
Malcolm Gladwell
#33. You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.
Malcolm Gladwell
#34. Having a parent incarcerated increases a child's chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.
Malcolm Gladwell
#35. We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
Malcolm Gladwell
#36. University of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto - although that, of course, didn't mean much, since Roseto
Malcolm Gladwell
#37. Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?
Malcolm Gladwell
#39. The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.
Malcolm Gladwell
#40. Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They'd have nothing to blog about.
Malcolm Gladwell
#41. Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.
Malcolm Gladwell
#42. Of the three, the third trait - the idea that epidemics can rise or fall in one dramatic moment - is the most important, because it is the principle that makes sense of the first two and that permits the greatest insight into why modern change happens the way it does. The
Malcolm Gladwell
#43. A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.
Malcolm Gladwell
#44. There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have to do with the absence of material resources- and the reason underdogs win as often as they do is that the latter is sometimes every bit the equal of the former.
Malcolm Gladwell
#45. You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.
Malcolm Gladwell
#48. The simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice,
Malcolm Gladwell
#49. I have a new way of doing things, and I don't care if you think I'm crazy.
Malcolm Gladwell
#50. If everyone has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing.
Malcolm Gladwell
#51. Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.
Malcolm Gladwell
#52. It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.
Malcolm Gladwell
#54. What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.
Malcolm Gladwell
#56. Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn't be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself.
Malcolm Gladwell
#57. I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.
Malcolm Gladwell
#58. I'm someone who can provide an intellectual framework, but I can't tell people who are trying to sell Product X how to do that because I don't know, and I would be faking it if I attempted to step into that role.
Malcolm Gladwell
#59. Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects.
Malcolm Gladwell
#60. 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
#61. David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.
Malcolm Gladwell
#62. If people disobey, don't ask what is wrong with them, ask what's wrong with their leaders.
Malcolm Gladwell
#63. There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.
Malcolm Gladwell
#64. 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
#65. His becoming a true outlier, we have to know a lot more about him than that.
Malcolm Gladwell
#66. The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.
Malcolm Gladwell
#67. You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?
Malcolm Gladwell
#68. An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.
Malcolm Gladwell
#69. If Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you're really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me.
Malcolm Gladwell
#70. When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.
Malcolm Gladwell
#72. We overlook just how large a role we all play
and by 'we' I mean society
in determining who makes it and who doesn't.
Malcolm Gladwell
#73. When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.
Malcolm Gladwell
#74. 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
#75. If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
Malcolm Gladwell
#76. If I am still a somber man, incapable of laughing whole-heartedly,
Malcolm Gladwell
#77. It is not possible to staff a large company without short people. There simply aren't enough tall people to go around.
Malcolm Gladwell
#78. 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
#79. We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.
Malcolm Gladwell
#80. The Law of the Few, ... says that one critical factor in epidemics is the nature of the messenger.
Malcolm Gladwell
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick a blanket This is an example of what's called a divergence test
Malcolm Gladwell
#84. The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems.
Malcolm Gladwell
#85. One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.
Malcolm Gladwell
#86. No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
Malcolm Gladwell
#87. The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.
Malcolm Gladwell
#88. To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success
the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history
with a society that provides opportunities for all.
Malcolm Gladwell
#89. But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside.
Malcolm Gladwell
#91. As human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.
Malcolm Gladwell
#92. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.
Malcolm Gladwell
#93. People who bring transformative change have courage, know how to re-frame the problem and have a sense of urgency.
Malcolm Gladwell
#94. The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.
Malcolm Gladwell
#95. When I saw the kouros for the first time," he said, "I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.
Malcolm Gladwell
#96. Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.(p.115)
Malcolm Gladwell
#97. Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.
Malcolm Gladwell
#98. Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.
Malcolm Gladwell
#99. Instinct is the gift of experience. The first question you have to ask yourself is, 'On what basis am I making a judgment?' ... If you have no experience, then your instincts aren't any good.
Malcolm Gladwell
#100. That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.
Malcolm Gladwell
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