Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “The As were judged to be much more alert, poised, attractive, and well dressed. In fact, the scores on those four dimensions are so different as to make you think you are looking at two different species of humans. You aren’t, of course. You’re simply seeing the difference between those schooled by their families to present their best face to the world, and those denied that experience.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

353. “This person will have been born in a.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

354. “University of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto – although that, of course, didn’t mean much, since Roseto.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

355. “For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

356. “But let’s not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you’ve probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

357. “To the extent that the war planners back in Washington conceived of a firebombing campaign, they thought of hitting six Japanese cities, not sixty-seven. By July, LeMay was bombing minor Japanese cities that had no strategically important industry at all – just people, living in tinderboxes.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

358. “Somewhere in retirement, Haywood Hansell saw that announcement in the newspaper, and I’m sure he wondered why he didn’t get an award as well for the effort he put toward fighting a war with as few civilian casualties as possible. But we don’t give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

359. “A study at the University of Utah found that if you ask someone why he is friendly with someone else, he’ll say it is because he and his friend share similar attitudes. But if you actually quiz the two of them on their attitudes, you’ll find out that what they actually share is similar activities. We’re friends with the people we do things with, as much as we are with the people we resemble. We don’t seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

360. “I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

361. “E3-20171107-JV-PC.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

362. “The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. “Put people into two categories,” Schwartz says. “Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

363. “That fundamentally undermines your ability to access the best part of your instincts. So my advice to those people would be stop thinking and introspecting so much and do a little more acting.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

364. “We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can’t.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

365. “They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

366. “When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he’s wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because – and perhaps this is even more critical – the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

367. “There they are, the professor and the prodigy, and what they prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged, at long last, with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does. But he fails. In fact – and this is the most heartbreaking part of all – he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor. The professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

368. “It is embarrassing how feeble I feel, how timidly I move through life, always guarded, ready to defend myself, ready to be angry.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

369. “You know, in order to make somebody laugh, you have to be interesting, and in order to be interesting, you have to do things that are mean. Comedy comes out of anger, and interesting comes out of angry; otherwise there is no conflict. But he was able to be mean and you forgave him, and you have to be able to forgive somebody, because at the end of the day, you still have to be with him, even after he’s dumped the girl or made some choices that you don’t agree with.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

370. “Human Rights Watch: “Nationwide, the rate of drug admissions to state prison for black men is thirteen times greater than the rate for white men. In ten states black men are sent to state prison on drug charges at rates that are 26 to 57 times greater than those of white men in the same state. In Illinois, for example, the state with the highest rate of black male drug offender admissions to prison, a black man is 57 times more likely to be sent to prison on drug charges than a white man.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

371. “The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

372. “Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

373. “The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

374. “Success is not a function of individual talent. It’s the steady accumulation of advantages. It’s bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

375. “Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that’s nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

376. “Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren’t achieving, is that there isn’t enough of it.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

377. “Our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up with where we’re from, and being a good pilot and coming from a high–power distance culture is a difficult mix.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

378. “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.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

379. “You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

380. “Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

381. “It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

382. “We are all of us not merely liable to fear, we are also prone to be afraid of being afraid, and the conquering of fear produces exhilaration.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

383. “Lareau calls the middle-class parenting style “concerted cultivation.” It’s an attempt to actively “foster and assess a child’s talents, opinions and skills.” Poor parents tend to follow, by contrast, a strategy of “accomplishment of natural growth.” They see as their responsibility to.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

384. “My earliest memories of my father are of seeing him work at his desk and realizing that he was happy. I did not know it then, but that was one of the most precious gifts a father can give his child.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

385. “What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

386. “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. 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

387. “It’s a rags-to-riches story, and everything we’ve learned so far from hockey players and software billionaires and the Termites suggests that success doesn’t happen that way. Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

388. “To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative – to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception – is worse.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

389. “But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” 1 Samuel 16:7.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

390. “There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

391. “It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

392. “The Stickiness Factor says that there are specific ways of making a contagious message memorable; there are relatively simple changes in the presentation and structuring of information that can make a big difference in how much of an impact it makes.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

393. “My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry – and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

394. “Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick a blanket This is an example of what’s called a “divergence test.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

395. “Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

396. “Cultural legacies matter, and once we’ve seen the surprising effects of such things as power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second, it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our twenty-first century intellectual tasks.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

397. “6. Before the Memorial Cup final, Gord Wasden – the father of one of the Medicine Hat Tigers – stood by the side of the ice, talking about his son Scott. He was wearing a Medicine Hat baseball cap and a black Medicine Hat T-shirt. “When he was four and five years old,” Wasden.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

398. “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’re really like to be.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

399. “I suspect people who are indecisive are people who are far too enamored of analysis in all settings and are destroying their ability to make an instinctive judgment through over-analysis and that’s dangerous.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

400. “Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.”

— Malcolm Gladwell