785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

From experience we gain a powerful gift, the ability to act instinctively, in the moment. But – and this is one of the lessons I tried very hard to impart in Blink – it is easy to disrupt this gift.

If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented”; and if you provide the “talented” with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.

We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is. We think of things as helpful that actually aren’t and think of other things as unhelpful that in reality leave us stronger and wiser. Part One of David and Goliath is an attempt to explore the consequences of that error. When we see the giant, why do we automatically assume the battle is his for the winning? And what does it take to be that person who doesn’t accept the conventional order of things as a given-.

Greece Portugal Guatemala Uruguay Belgium.

Lesson Number One: The Importance of Being Jewish.

It is quite possible for people who have never met us and who have spent only twenty minutes thinking about us to come to a better understanding of who we are than people who have known us for years.

There’s no possibility of being pessimistic when people are dependent on you for their only optimism.

Our world requires that decisions be sourced and footnoted, and if we say how we feel, we must also be prepared to elaborate on why we feel that way. I think that approach is a mistake, and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgements. We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that – sometimes – we’re better off that way.