Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

452. “If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

453. “The deceptions of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff, the confusion over Amanda Knox, the plights of Graham Spanier and Emily Doe are all evidence of the underlying problem we have in making sense of people we do not know. Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

454. “Am I a dog that you should come to me with sticks?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

455. “Sometimes the most modest changes can bring about enormous effects.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

456. “These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles – these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize – are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

457. “Instead of thinking about talent as something that you acquire, talent should be thought of as something that you develop.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

458. “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

459. “One of the main reasons college professors accept a lower paycheck than they could get in private industry is that university life gives them the freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right. Langan has Harvard backwards.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

460. “Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is – is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

461. “I should point out that I have a picture of Asbel Kiprop as the screensaver on my phone. Is that embarrassing?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

462. “From experience we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment. But – and this is one of the lessons I tried very hard to impart in Blink – it is easy to disrupt this gift.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

463. “We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

464. “If you play an audiotape of a yawn to blind people, they’ll yawn too.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

465. “If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

466. “To look closely at complex behaviors like smoking or suicide or crime is to appreciate how suggestible we are in the face of what we see and hear, and how acutely sensitive we are to even the smallest details of everyday life. That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

467. “When crime drops dramatically in New York for no apparent reason, or when a movie made on a shoestring budget ends up making hundreds of millions of dollars – we’re surprised. I’m saying, don’t be surprised. This is the way social epidemics work.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

468. “If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. “The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

469. “There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

470. “Character isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

471. “And everyone knows that it’s better to have an expert show you – and not just tell you – how to play tennis or golf or a musical instrument. We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instructions.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

472. “When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

473. “There is actually a significant scientific literature measuring Asian “persistence.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

474. “There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it’s the back jacket of books.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

475. “That’s the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

476. “A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

477. “LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

478. “Without the New York Times, there is no blog community. They’d have nothing to blog about.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

479. “I’m convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

480. “Some of us, after all, are very good at expressing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us. Psychologists call these people “senders.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

481. “Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

482. “We are approaching levels – if we’re not beyond levels – of threshold for the number of messages that consumers can take in in a given day. There is a kind of hunger for some kind of new approach to getting the word out about something.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

483. “In other words, in all of the city of Colorado Springs-a town of well in excess of 100,000 people-the epidemic of gonorrhea tipped because of the activities of 168 people living in four small neighborhoods and basically frequenting the same six bars.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

484. “This idea of the importance of stickiness in tipping has enormous implications for the way we regard social epidemics as well. We tend to spend a lot of time thinking about how to make messages more contagious – how to reach as many people as possible with our products or ideas. But the hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

485. “And why did so many of the British politicians who met with Hitler misread him so badly? Because Hitler was mismatched as well. Remember Chamberlain’s remark about how Hitler greeted him with a double-handed handshake, which Chamberlain believed Hitler reserved for people he liked and trusted? For many of us, a warm and enthusiastic handshake does mean that we feel warm and enthusiastic about the person we’re meeting. But not Hitler. He’s the dishonest person who acts honest.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

486. “Numerous studies of human cognition have come to parallel conclusions: the human brain can divide random stimuli into about six or seven different categories. For example, the average person can distinguish between about six different musical notes before getting confused.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

487. “If you knew my father, you would have seen him in other stressful situations, and you would have come to understand that the “frightened” face, for whatever reason, was simply not part of his repertoire. In crisis, he turned deadly calm. But if you didn’t know him, what would you have thought? Would you have concluded that he was cold? Unfeeling? When we confront a stranger, we have to substitute an idea – a stereotype – for direct experience. And that stereotype is wrong all too often.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

488. “Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

489. “But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

490. “In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

491. “So here is the question: once the number-one form of suicide in England became a physiological impossibility, did the people who wanted to kill themselves switch to other methods? Or did the people who would have put their heads in ovens now not commit suicide at all?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

492. “Markopolos sees his mistake now, with the benefit of over a decade of hindsight. But in the midst of things, the same brilliant mind that was capable of unraveling Madoff’s deceptions was incapable of getting people in positions of responsibility to take him seriously. That’s the consequence of not defaulting to truth. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

493. “I’m drawn again and again to obsessives. I like them. I like the idea that someone could push away all the concerns and details that make up everyday life and just zero in on one thing – the thing that fits the contours of his or her imagination. Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can’t see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world’s but also their own narrow interests. But I don’t think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.”

— Malcolm Gladwell