Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

202. “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

203. “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

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

205. “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

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

207. “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

208. “The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

209. “For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

210. “Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

211. “If we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

212. “George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

213. “The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution – and, in many cases, the support of their peers – in the service of exposing fraud and deceit.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

214. “In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

215. “Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

216. “What’s the rest of the country like, Uncle Al?’ And he said, ‘Kiddo. When you leave New York, every place is Bridgeport.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

217. “Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

218. “The thing you have to understand about that crash,” Ratwatte said, “is that New York air traffic controllers are famous for being rude, aggressive, and bullying. They are also.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

219. “The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grades, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn’t seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

220. “Performance ought to improve with experience, and pressure is an obstacle that the diligent can overcome.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

221. “It’s very hard to find someone who’s successful and dislikes what they do.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

222. “Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

223. “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.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

224. “Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

225. “A Connector might tell ten friends where to stay in Los Angeles, and half of them might take his advice. A Maven might tell five people where to stay in Los Angeles but make the case for the hotel so emphatically that all of them would take his advice. These are different personalities at work, acting for different reasons. But they both have the power to spark word-of-mouth epidemics.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

226. “When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

227. “The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies – his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness – in the service of perfection.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

228. “Having a parent incarcerated increases a child’s chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

229. “When we make a split-second decision,” Payne says, “we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

230. “Lots of people drink when they are feeling down because they think it will chase their troubles away. That’s inhibition-thinking: alcohol will unlock my good mood. But that’s plainly not what happens. Sometimes alcohol cheers us up. But at other times, when an anxious person drinks they just get more anxious. Myopia theory has an answer to that puzzle: it depends on what the anxious, drunk person is doing.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

231. “The statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer.” In the backcountry, violence wasn’t for economic gain. It was personal. You fought over your honor.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

232. “Of course, kids don’t always like repetition. Whatever they are watching has to be complex enough to allow, upon repeated exposure, for deeper and deeper levels of comprehension. At the same time, it can’t be so complex that the first time around it baffles the children and turns them off.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

233. “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.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

234. “We talk a lot here about grit and self-control. The kids know what those words mean.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

235. “Father: ‘Anything but journalism.’ I rebelled.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

236. “The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930′s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

237. “By shifting the balance away from the individual we open the door for the individual. Because we make it obvious that anyone can do it given the right circumstance.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

238. “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.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

239. “In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

240. “In a devastating critique, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termites – and.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

241. “If your parents are billionaires, that might actually be an obstacle to your own happiness and self-development. If you go to Oxford or Harvard, that might actually thwart your desire to graduate with a science or math degree.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

242. “I’m totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it’s OK because I’m doing it for a reason, for a good reason.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

243. “Your unconscious, in the sense, was acting as a kind of mental valet. It was taking care of all the minor mental details in your life. It was keeping tabs on everything going on around you and making sure you were acting appropriately, while leaving you free to concentrate on the main problem at hand.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

244. “I don’t really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I’ve read them, so most of the books I’ve read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

245. “The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn” – the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

246. “An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone – or even close to everyone.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

247. “Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

248. “There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

249. “We have seen,” Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, “that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

250. “All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.”

— Malcolm Gladwell