785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

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.

When it’s easy to make money, you have no incentive to think about development of talent.

In the Big Pond chapter, I talked about the fact that being on the outside, in a less elite and less privileged environment, can give you more freedom to pursue your own ideas and academic interests.

Innovators have to be open. They have to be able to imagine things that others cannot and to be willing to challenge their own preconceptions.

The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context.

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.

We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds.

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.

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.