785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!

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.

We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.

We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It's the other way around. Effort can trump ability-relentl ess effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coordination.

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.

I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never.