785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

Hard world is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning.

Emotion goes inside-out. Emotional contagion, though, suggests that the opposite is also true. If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad. Emotion, in this sense, goes outside-in.

Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.

Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

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.

Truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.

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.

In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.