785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

Snap judgments are, first of all, enormously quick: they rely on the thinnest slices of experience. But they are also unconscious.

The closest we have to Holy Fools in modern life are whistleblowers. They are willing to sacrifice loyalty to their institution – and, in many cases, the support of their peers – in the service of exposing fraud and deceit.

Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking – It will make you wrinkled! It will make you impotent! It will make you dead! – is useless,” Harris concludes. “This is adult propaganda; these are adult arguments. It is because adults don’t approve of smoking – because there is something dangerous and disreputable about it – that teenagers want to do it.

What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.

University of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto – although that, of course, didn’t mean much, since Roseto.

The great accomplishment of Jobs’s life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies – his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness – in the service of perfection.

Why are we so squeamish? Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge?

I’m convinced that ideas and behaviors and new products move through a population very much like a disease does.

Character isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context.