Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

305. “The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

306. “This is the real lesson of Blink: It is not enough simply to explore the hidden recesses of our unconscious. Once we know about how the mind works – and about the strengths and weaknesses of human judgment – it is our responsibility to act.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

307. “What Hartshorne and May concluded, then, is that something like honesty isn’t a fundamental trait, or what they called a “unified” trait. A trait like honesty, they concluded, is considerably influenced by the situation.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

308. “So what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate-at every variety of monkey and ape-the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

309. “So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it’s OK.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

310. “And do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the Internet? Bill Joy.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

311. “A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

312. “They were unconvinced of the power of giants.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

313. “You’ve got to let people work out the situation and work out what’s happening. The danger in calling is that they’ll tell you anything to get you off their backs, and if you act on that and take it at face value, you could make a mistake. Plus you are diverting them. Now they are looking upward instead of downward. You’re preventing them from resolving the situation.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

314. “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. This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

315. “Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

316. “But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, or being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

317. “In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

318. “I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology – and our ability to accentuate and exploit them – is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

319. “Louis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for $8 a month. Louis then took to the streets, looking for work. He saw peddlers and fruit sellers and sidewalks crammed with pushcarts. The noise and activity and energy dwarfed what he had known in the Old World. He was first overwhelmed, then invigorated. He went.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

320. “Default to truth becomes an issue when we are forced to choose between two alternatives, one of which is likely and the other of which is impossible to imagine.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

321. “Broncos hockey game in southern Alberta, a team that played in the same Major Junior A league as the Vancouver Giants.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

322. “What Wolf began to realize was that.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

323. “An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

324. “That’s not because journalists know more about Japan. It’s because they knew less: they had the ability to sort through what they knew and find a pattern.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

325. “What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

326. “Greece Portugal Guatemala Uruguay Belgium.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

327. “What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

328. “You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

329. “Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

330. “At three and four and five, children may not be able to follow complicated plots and subplots. But the narrative form, psychologists now believe, is absolutely central to them.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

331. “We could start by no longer penalizing one another for defaulting to truth. If you are a parent whose child was abused by a stranger – even if you were in the room – that does not make you a bad parent. And if you are a university president and you do not jump to the worst-case scenario when given a murky report about one of your employees, that doesn’t make you a criminal. To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

332. “Perhaps the most common – and the most important – forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

333. “Why are man hole covers around?” If you don’t knwo the answer to the questions, you’re not smart enough to work at microsoft.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

334. “The issue isn’t the accuracy of the bombs you have, it’s how you use the bombs you have – and more importantly, whether you ought to use bombs at all.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

335. “Gottman is far more selective. He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

336. “From experience, we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

337. “In Steiger’s case, of course, his high connectedness is a function of his versatility as an actor and, in all likelihood, some degree of good luck. But in the case of Connectors, their ability to span many different worlds is a function of something intrinsic to their personality, some combination of curiosity, self-confidence, sociability, and energy.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

338. “They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every major art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers interested in their paintings.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

339. “An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine – Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

340. “Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way. I think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgements. 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

341. “Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

342. “Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn’t be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

343. “Visionaries are limited by their visions.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

344. “Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking – It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead! – is useless,” Harris concludes. “This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults don’t approve of smoking – because there is something dangerous and disreputable about it – that teenagers want to do it.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

345. “Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the New World the culture of honor they had created in the Old World. “To the first settlers, the American backcountry was a dangerous environment, just as the British borderlands had been,” the historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed. Much of the southern highlands were “debatable lands” in the border sense of a contested territory without established government or the rule of law. The borderers were more at home.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

346. “But is the commercial theory of learning true? Daniel Anderson says that new research suggests that children actually don’t like commercials as much as we thought they did because commercials “don’t tell stories, and stories have a particular salience and importance to young people.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

347. “Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

348. “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

349. “If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison,” Clear concluded, “the effect on crime starts to reverse.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

350. “You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him,” he says. 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