Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 10

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

52. “The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

53. “Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

54. “Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that 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

55. “We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

56. “The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

57. “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

58. “Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

59. “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

60. “If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

61. “Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

62. “The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

63. “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

64. “Activism that challenges the status quo, that attacks deeply rooted problems, is not for the faint of heart.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

65. “It’s not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

66. “We sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability. You either have “it” or you don’t. But to Schoenfeld, it’s not so much ability as attitude. You master mathematics if you are willing to try.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

67. “The three rules of the Tipping Point – the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context – offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

68. “In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. 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

69. “That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

70. “There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

71. “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

72. “When you’re an underdog, you’re forced to try things you would never otherwise have attempted.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

73. “Arousal leaves us mind-blind.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

74. “Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

75. “Nobody accomplishes success by themselves.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

76. “The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

77. “Change your mind about something significant every day.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

78. “Without persistence, principles are meaningless. Because one day your dream may come true. And if you cannot keep that dream alive in the interim, then who are you?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

79. “Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

81. “Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

82. “Successful people don’t do it alone.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

83. “Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

84. “The goal of storytelling should be to make stories as ubiquitous as music.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

85. “Anyone who knows the marketing world knows that ideas come and go, and people latch onto things and think of them as a kind of solution...”

— Malcolm Gladwell

86. “David and Goliath is a book about what happens when ordinary people confront giants.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

87. “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

88. “I think that the task of figuring out how to combine the best of conscious deliberation and instinctive judgment is one of the great challenges of our time.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

89. “Choking is about thinking too much. Panic is about thinking too little. Choking is about loss of instinct. Panic is reversion to instinct. They may look the same, but they are worlds apart.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

90. “People are experience-rich and theory-poor.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

91. “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

92. “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

93. “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

94. “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert – in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

95. “Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

96. “That’s your responsibility as a person, as a human being – to constantly be updating your positions on as many things as possible. And if you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

97. “When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters-first and foremost-how they behave.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

98. “To be someone’s best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

99. “That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

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

— Malcolm Gladwell