Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

potatoes, melons, and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent, and a cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant — given

The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call “diminishing marginal returns” sets in. If your family makes seventy-five thousand and your neighbor makes a hundred thousand, that extra twenty-five thousand a year means that your neighbor can drive a nicer car and go out to eat slightly more often. But it doesn’t make your neighbor happier than you, or better equipped to do the thousands of small and large things that make for being a good parent.

Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head — even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.

We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is — and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.

lower. As the sociologist John Shelton Reed has written, “The homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is being killed by someone he (or often she) knows, for reasons both killer and victim understand.” Reed adds: “The statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American, and probably safer.” In the backcountry, violence wasn’t for economic gain. It was personal. You fought over your honor. Many years ago, the southern newspaperman Hodding Carter told the story of how as a young man he served on a jury. As Reed describes it: The case before the jury involved an irascible gentleman who lived

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.

you weren’t that unhappy. “Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity,” Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. “If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system.” Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally — by comparing ourselves to people “in the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish. If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening. If you bomb a city, you leave behind death and destruction. But you create a community of remote misses. If you take away a mother or a father, you cause suffering and despair. But one time in ten, out of that despair rises as indomitable force. You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with sword and shield and the glittering armor. But so much of what is beautiful and valuable in the world comes from the shepherd, who has more strength and purpose than we ever imagine.

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.

If we want to, say, develop schools in disadvantaged communities that can successfully counteract the poisonous atmosphere of their surrounding neighborhoods, this tells us that we’re probably better off building lots of little schools than one or two big ones.

An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience.

Working really hard is what successful people do...

According to research done by Mitchell Chang of the University of California, the likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree — all things being equal — rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university’s average SAT score.4 The smarter your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science.

All they were using for their prediction was their analysis of the surgeon’s tone of voice. In fact, it was even more basic than that: if the surgeon’s voice was judged to sound dominant, the surgeon tended to be in the sued group. If the voice sounded less dominant and more concerned, the surgeon tended to be in the non-sued group. Could there be a thinner slice? Malpractice sounds like one of those infinitely complicated and multidimensional problems. But in the end it comes down to a matter of respect, and the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice, and the most corrosive tone of voice that a doctor can assume is a dominant tone.

I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.They grow in thickness, perhaps, and that is what I am doing.