Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

102. “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

103. “All the outliers we’ve looked at so far were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky breaks don’t seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes. They seem like the rule.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

104. “We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

105. “We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

106. “If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises an indomitable force.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

107. “Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor – the way they represent themselves on the outside – provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

108. “The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

110. “Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn’t happen.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

111. “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

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

113. “Did they know why they knew? Not at all. But the Knew!”

— Malcolm Gladwell

114. “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. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

115. “And the Beatles didn’t recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

116. “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. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

117. “We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

118. “Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

119. “The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

120. “To make sense of social epidemics, we must first understand that human communication has its own set of very unusual and counterintuitive rules.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

121. “You don’t manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

122. “It’s not about how smart you are. It’s about your values.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

123. “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

124. “But the better answer is that Hotchkiss has simply fallen into the trap that wealthy people and wealthy institutions and wealthy countries – all Goliaths – too often fall into: the school assumes that the kinds of things that wealth can buy always translate into real-world advantages.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

125. “We are bad lie detectors in those situations when the person we’re judging is mismatched.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

126. “The “culture of honor” hypothesis says that it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It’s just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

127. “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

128. “What is an outlier?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

129. “Modern systems, Perrow argues, are made up of thousands of parts, all of which interrelate in ways that are impossible to anticipate. Given that complexity, he says, it is almost inevitable that some combinations of minor failures will eventually amount to something catastrophic.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

130. “Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else’s and says, angrily, ‘I don’t buy it.’ Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else’s head – even if in the end you conclude that someone else’s head is not a place you’d really like to be.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

131. “Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

132. “It’s the kind of wisdom that someone acquires after a lifetime of learning and watching and doing. It’s judgment And what Blink is – what all the stories and studies and arguments add up to – is an attempt to understand this magical and mysterious thing called judgment.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

133. “Those immigrants, in turn, sent word back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and soon one.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

134. “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

135. “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

136. “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” – Matthew 25:29.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

137. “Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

138. “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

139. “In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

140. “Incompetence is certainty in the absence of expertise. Overconfidence is certainty in the presence of expertise.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

141. “Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from – and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

142. “Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed. If it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein. Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

143. “Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

144. “The first set of mistakes we make with strangers – the default to truth and the illusion of transparency – has to do with our inability to make sense of the stranger as an individual. But on top of those errors we add another, which pushes our problem with strangers into crisis. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

145. “Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

146. “Because we do not know how to talk to strangers, what do we do when things go awry with strangers? We blame the stranger.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

147. “Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

148. “Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from – and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

149. “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

150. “The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.”

— Malcolm Gladwell