Top 450 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Acquaintances represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

402. “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

403. “I’m a purist: I start to wrinkle my nose when the Cold War ends.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

404. “When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

405. “The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

406. “If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

407. “There’s no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

408. “The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

409. “All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can’t look away one time and scream at him another. You can’t treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn’t hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

410. “For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

411. “I think actually the marketing community is approaching a crisis: There are just too many messages competing for too little attention. That is the fundamental problem.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

412. “Korean hierarchy: formal deference, informal deference, blunt, familiar, intimate, and plain.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

413. “We need a better guide to facing giants – and there is no better place to start that journey than with the epic confrontation between David and Goliath three thousand years ago in the Valley of Elah.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

414. “What is learned out of hard work and trial is inevitably more powerful than what is learned easily.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

415. “When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters – first and foremost – how they behave. This is called the “principle.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

416. “People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

417. “My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person – Jacob – who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

418. “I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

419. “To become a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity, because the deep respect for authority that runs throughout Korean culture simply does not work in the cockpit.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

420. “The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

421. “We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

422. “A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. 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. – Chapter 8.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

423. “If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

424. “Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

425. “Sometimes constraints actually create success. Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

426. “Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

427. “It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

428. “It changes how people read you if you believe in God. It gives insight into your motivation, how you look at problems and how you deal with people.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

429. “Farkas’s Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

430. “We form our impression not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally, by comparing ourselves to people in the same boat as ourselves.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

431. “Hell, yeah, we’re going to ride,” the cussing preacher said and addressed his board. “Find you any kind of crack you can to hide in if you’re scared, but I’m walking downtown after this meeting and getting on the bus. I’m not going to look back to see who’s following me.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

432. “The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

433. “We can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

434. “They were so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

435. “Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

436. “I became convinced that knowing lots of people was kind of skill, something that the diligent can overcome.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

437. “Re-reading is much underrated. I’ve read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

438. “It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

439. “Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?”

— Malcolm Gladwell

440. “It’s as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

441. “We fall out of truth-default mode only when the case against our initial assumption becomes definitive. We do not behave, in other words, like sober-minded scientists, slowly gathering evidence of the truth or falsity of something before reaching a conclusion. We do the opposite. 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

442. “I’m someone who can provide an intellectual framework, but I can’t tell people who are trying to sell Product X how to do that because I don’t know, and I would be faking it if I attempted to step into that role.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

443. “It’s a lot like what people do when they are in psychoanalysis: they spend years analyzing their unconscious with the help of a trained therapist until they begin to get a sense of how their mind works. Heylmun and Civille have done the same thing – only they haven’t psychoanalyzed their feelings; they’ve psychoanalyzed their feelings for mayonnaise and Oreo cookies.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

444. “Improvisation comedy is a wonderful example of the kind of thinking that Blink is about. It involves make very sophisticated decisions on the spur of the moment without the benefit of any kind of script or plot. That’s what makes it so compelling and – to be frank – terrifying.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

445. “I think overall it’s a disadvantage,” Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

446. “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.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

447. “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 friend, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small physical spaces that we do.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

448. “Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

449. “The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.”

— Malcolm Gladwell

450. “Policy is driven by more than politics, however. It is equally driven by ideas.”

— Malcolm Gladwell