785 Quotes by Malcolm Gladwell

The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.

Our intuitions, as humans, aren’t always very good. Changes that happen really suddenly, on the strength of the most minor of input, can be deeply confusing.

Most people with a serious disability cannot master all those steps. But those who can are better off than they would have been otherwise, because what is learned out of necessity is inevitably more powerful than the learning that comes easily.

Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom.

He was an underdog and a misfit, and that gave him the freedom to try things no one else even dreamt of.

Respect for others requires a complicated calculation in which one party agrees to moderate their own desires, to consider the longer-term consequences of their own behavior, to think about something other than the thing right in front of them.

It’s as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.

I’m totally engaging in cultural stereotyping, no question about it. But I think it’s OK because I’m doing it for a reason, for a good reason.

It wasn’t an excuse. It was a fact. He’d had to make his way alone, and no one – not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses – ever makes it alone.