785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.

The three rules of the Tipping Point – the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context – offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point.

The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

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.

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.

You can learn as much – or more – from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face.

If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.

In the past generation, the American educational system has decided not to seek the very best teachers, give them lots of kids to teach, and pay them more – which would help children the most. It has decided to hire every teacher it can get its hands on and pay them less.

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.