785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can’t look away one time and scream at him another. You can’t treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn’t hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself.

I’m someone who can provide an intellectual framework, but I can’t tell people who are trying to sell Product X how to do that because I don’t know, and I would be faking it if I attempted to step into that role.

You know, in order to make somebody laugh, you have to be interesting, and in order to be interesting, you have to do things that are mean. Comedy comes out of anger, and interesting comes out of angry; otherwise there is no conflict. But he was able to be mean and you forgave him, and you have to be able to forgive somebody, because at the end of the day, you still have to be with him, even after he’s dumped the girl or made some choices that you don’t agree with.

Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground.

And when the law is applied in the absence of legitimacy, it does not produce obedience. It produces the opposite. It leads to backlash.6.

Gottman has proven something remarkable. If he analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 percent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.

Popeils had been doing for most of the century, and what all the experts said couldn’t be done in the modern economy. He dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself.

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.

Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience; I think that’s nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.