Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are ...

For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over ...

We have become obsessed with what is good about small classrooms and oblivious about what also can b...

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and ...

Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if the...

We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but loca...

... forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a ...

Much of what we consider valuable in our world arises out of (these) one-sided conflicts. Because th...

Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and ha...

. . . I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storyte...

Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily...

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action."(p...

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can ...

Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize th...

Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma. And the answer is that we ...

...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority hav...

If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like...

[Research] suggests that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we ...

In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CE...

The entire principle of a blind taste test was ridiculous. They shouldn't have cared so much that th...

In life, most of us are highly skilled at suppressing action. All the improvisation teacher has to d...

Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion...

Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the ...

The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism ca...

The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very simil...

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. I...

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 ...

The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a ...

Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I ...

In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.

That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have...

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation...

Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most pe...

That's like being a hockey player born on January I.

Hard work is only a prison sentence when you lack motivation

Hard world is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one ...

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we w...

We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean

The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals,...

Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of i...

The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he...

The notion that the only way you can critically engage with a person’s ideas is to take a shot at th...

The name given to that one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once is ...

To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages th...

When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this ...

The power of positive thinking will overcome so many things

The underdog winning is the romantic position.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the...

The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a ben...

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse....

You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people ...

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

Do you remember the wrestler Andre the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly.

The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.

Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technol...

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But tha...

When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.

A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her frien...

The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. I...

I've been in auditions without screens, and I can assure you that I was prejudiced. I began to liste...

A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fr...

There is a set of advantages that have to do with material resources, and there is a set that have t...

Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are ofte...

For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what ...

So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept auth...