785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell


  • Author Malcolm Gladwell
  • Quote

    Goliath was blind to his approach – and then he was down, too big and slow and blurry-eyed to comprehend the way the tables had been turned. All these years, we’ve been telling these kinds of stories wrong. David and Goliath is about getting them right.

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  • Author Malcolm Gladwell
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    If suicide is coupled, then it isn’t simply the act of depressed people. It’s the act of depressed people at a particular moment of extreme vulnerability and in combination with a particular, readily available lethal means.

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  • Author Malcolm Gladwell
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    What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz’s ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.

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  • Author Malcolm Gladwell
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    We have a default to truth: our operating assumption is that the people we are dealing with are honest.

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  • Author Malcolm Gladwell
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    Just think about how many times you have criticized someone else, in hindsight, for their failure to spot a liar. You should have known. There were all kinds of red flags. You had doubts. Levine would say that’s the wrong way to think about the problem. The right question is: were there enough red flags to push you over the threshold of belief? If there weren’t, then by defaulting to truth you were only being human.

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  • Author Malcolm Gladwell
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    Occasions when you can change your mind should be cherished, because they mean you’re smarter than you were before.

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  • Author Malcolm Gladwell
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    Perhaps the most common – and the most important – forms of rapid cognition are the judgments we make and the impressions we form of other people. Every waking minute that we are in the presence of someone, we come up with a constant stream of predictions and inferences about what that person is thinking and feeling.

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