Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

254. “People who are busy doing things – as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops -don’t have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

255. “It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

256. “They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten.” Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

257. “Hey, say you are looking at a chess board. Is there anything you can’t see? No. But are you guaranteed to win? Not at all, because you can’t see what the other guy is thinking.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

258. “The results from these experiments are, obviously, quite disturbing. They suggest that what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize. But.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

259. “As human beings, we always expect everyday change to happen slowly and steadily, and for there to be some relationship between cause and effect.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

260. “Our intuitions, as humans, aren’t always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

261. “Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

262. “In epidemics, the messenger matters: messengers are what make something spread. But the content of the message matters too. And the specific quality that a message needs to be successful is the quality of “stickiness.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

263. “What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

264. “We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

265. “What screws up doctors when they are trying to predict heart attacks is that they take too much information into account.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

266. “We would all be sitting in our deck chairs in the backyard, and we would look up, and all of a sudden, the Air House – or maybe even some specific part of the Air House – would be gone. Poof. High-altitude precision bombing. Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

267. “You’re in a situation where you have two very important responsibilities that both have a deadline that is impossible to meet. You cannot accomplish both. How do you handle that situation?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

268. “My upbringing allowed me to be comfortable with failure,” he said. “The one trait in a lot of dyslexic people I know is that by the time we got out of college, our ability to deal with failure was very highly developed. And so we look at most situations and see much more of the upside than the downside. Because we’re so accustomed to to downside. It doesn’t faze us.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

269. “It is easier and far more satisfying to retreat and compose yourself after every score – and execute perfectly choreographed plays – than to swarm about, arms flailing, and contest every inch of the basketball court. Underdog strategies.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

270. “Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

271. “We vary greatly in the natural advantages that we’ve been given. The world’s not fair.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

272. “When you write down your thoughts, your chances of having the flash of insight you need in order to come up with a solution are significantly impaired.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

273. “Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

274. “A vervet, in other words, is very good at processing certain kinds of vervetish information, but not so good at processing other kinds of information.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

275. “The problem is that buried among the things we hate is a class of products that are in that category only because they are weird. They make us nervous. They are sufficiently different that it takes some time to understand that we actually like them.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

276. “The Impressionists were better for shunning the Salon. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

277. “Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn’t listening to you, that he’s talking down to you, and that he isn’t treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

278. “In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree – and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

279. “You have to explain the invention to customers – not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

280. “My great-great-great-grandmother.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

281. “They spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan’s Little Italy. Then they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans left Italy.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

282. “Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

283. “We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

284. “Para tener un CI alto, uno tiende a especializarse, a tener pensamientos profundos. A evitar toda banalidad.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

285. “There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect skills,” says the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. “To exploit that opportunity, you had to have certain virtues, and those immigrants worked hard. They sacrificed. They scrimped and saved and invested wisely. But still, you have to remember that the garment industry in those years was growing by leaps and bounds. The economy was desperate for the skills that they possessed.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

286. “Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

287. “Coupling is the idea that behaviors are linked to very specific circumstances and conditions.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

288. “The nature of athletic celebrity is increasingly moving away from the actual field of play.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

289. “It’s just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

290. “There’s no idea that can’t be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn’t get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old’s.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

291. “We start by believing. And we stop believing only when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

292. “A typical five-year-old consumes about 60 percent more ketchup than a typical forty-year-old, and the company realized that it needed to put ketchup in a bottle that a toddler could control.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

293. “People are in one of two states in a relationship,” Gottman went on. “The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotion overrides irritability. It’s like a buffer. Their spouse will do something bad, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s just in a crummy mood.’ Or they can be in negative sentiment override, so that even a relatively neutral thing that a partner says gets perceived as negative.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

294. “In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more – which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

295. “The Band-Aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

296. “The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

297. “Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

298. “A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

299. “Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

300. “But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do – or don’t do – to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.”

— Malcolm Gladwell