Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

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.

People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.

People don't rise from nothing.

There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria.

Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

I'm necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I'm still a parasite.

I'm a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.

We spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out who's going to be a good NFL quarterback, and we do a very bad job of it. We don't really know. And we also spend a lot of time trying to figure out who will be a good teacher, and we're really bad at that too. We don't know if someone is going to be a good teacher when they start teaching. So what should we do in those situations in which predictions are useless?

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.

Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

So the first task of a police force is not to fight crime and enforce the law. It is to establish legitimacy with the law-abiding citizenry and then fight crime and enforce the law.

[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.

An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.

The successful are those who have been given opportunities.

Since becoming a journalist, each time I engage with subjects I become more radicalized.

I don't like things that aren't true.

You can't concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, “What's gonna happen if it doesn't go right?

The difference isn't resources, it's attitude.

The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

All artists have to do that at a certain point. This shift that has to happen between the initial moment of creation and then the consideration of what has been created.

Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.

Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions.

our unconscious reactions come out of a locked room, and we can't look inside that room. but with experience we become expert at using our behavior and our training to interpret - and decode - what lies behind our snap judgment and first impressions.

The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.

What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.

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

Change your mind about something significant every day.

If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.

Trump is an innovator who has shown how out of step the political establishment was. Which I think, probably, in the long term will be healthy. We have to figure out how to reinvigorate our political institutions and he's demonstrating to us the urgency of that task.

There are lots of issues more important than where billionaires donate their money.

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made-on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

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.

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

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

Sometimes [genius] is just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.

When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex.

My writing model is my mother, who is a writer as well. She always valued clarity and simplicity above all else. If someone doesn't understand what you're writing, then everything else you do is superfluous. Irrelevant. If any thoughtful, curious reader finds what I do impenetrable, I've failed.

being able to act intelligently and instinctively in the moment is possible only after a long and rigorous of education and experience

A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

Father: 'Anything but journalism.' I rebelled.

When people reflexively write checks to institutions that have billions of dollars in the bank, they are essentially committing a moral crime. Your money could do good in this world and you're choosing instead to waste it. People have to do a better job of that. You've got to find places where your money's going to do some good and direct your dollars towards that institution.

If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they'll yawn too.

I'm in the storytelling business, and so you're always drawn to the unusual. And early on, I discovered that's the easiest way to tell stories... If you come up through a newspaper as I did, your whole goal is to get a story on the front page, and you only get something on the front page if it's unusual.