Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

152. “We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

153. “Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

154. “The lesson of the trickster tales is the third desirable difficulty: the unexpected freedom that comes from having nothing to lose. The trickster gets to break the rules.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

155. “Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. 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. And, most of all, we become much too passive.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

156. “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

157. “Puzzle Number One: Why can’t we tell when the stranger in front of us is lying to our face?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

159. “The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

160. “We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that-sometimes-we’re better off that way.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

161. “The Power of the Glance Thin-slicing is not an exotic gift. It is a central part of what it means to be human. We thin-slice whenever we meet a new person or have to make sense of something quickly or encounter a novel situation. We thin-slice because we have to, and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a second or two, can tell us an awful lot.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

162. “We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. 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

163. “The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

164. “There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

165. “We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

166. “Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

167. “Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment. This.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

168. “Why are we so squeamish? 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?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

169. “There is a concept in cognitive psychology called the channel capacity, which refers to the amount of space in our brain for certain kinds of information.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

170. “A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people’s problems, generally by solving his own,” Alpert said, which is true, although what I suspect is that the opposite is also true, that a Maven is someone who solves his own problems – his own emotional needs – by solving other people’s problems.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

171. “What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important lesson in that for battles with all kinds of giants. The powerful and the strong are not always what they seem.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

172. “I’m necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I’m still a parasite.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

173. “What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there’s a powerful amount of truth in that, I think.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

174. “But remember, the logic of the inverted-U curve is that the same strategies that work really well at first stop working past a certain point, and that’s exactly what many criminologists argue happens with punishment.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

175. “The excessive use of force creates legitimacy problems, and force without legitimacy leads to defiance, not submission.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

176. “The powerful are not as powerful as they seem – nor the weak as weak.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

177. “We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error. When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning? And what does it take to be that person who doesn’t accept the conventional order of things as a given-.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

178. “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” The.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

179. “Even the most gifted of lawyers, equipped with the best of family lessons, cannot escape the limitations of their generation.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

180. “When it’s easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

181. “High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

182. “No food without blood and sweat.” “Farmers are busy; farmers are busy; if farmers weren’t busy, where would grain to get through the winter come from?” “In winter, the lazy man freezes to death.” “Don’t depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load.” “Useless to ask about the crops, it all depends on hard work and fertilizer.” “If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

183. “What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

184. “The school year in the United States is, on average, 180 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

185. “We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

186. “It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

187. “Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

188. “And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.6.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

189. “The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family. She.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

190. “When Tom Gau and I sat across from each other in his office, then, we almost immediately fell into physical and conversational harmony. We were dancing. Even before he attempted to persuade me with his words, he had forged a bond with me with his movements and his speech.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

191. “The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

192. “You master mathematics if you are willing to try. That’s what Schoenfeld attempts to teach his students.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

193. “This is the gift of training and expertise – the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

194. “Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

195. “Just as Tom Gau could, through the persuasive force of his personality, serve as a Tipping Point in a word-of-mouth epidemic, the people who die in highly publicized suicides-whose deaths give others “permission” to die-serve as the Tipping Points in suicide epidemics.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

196. “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.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

197. “You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

198. “The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

199. “If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

200. “Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish.”

— Malcolm Gladwell