Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample

So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won’t be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293

... forgiveness is a religious imperative: forgive those who trespass against you. But it is also a very practical strategy based on the belief that there are profound limits to what the formal mechanisms of retribution can accomplish.

Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.

Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment.

he waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid's face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? this is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.

To assume the best about another is the trait that has created modern society. Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative — to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception — is worse.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger.

We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy.

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them.

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.

The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful.

If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters.

But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion.

Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.

We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t.

We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating.

When you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger — because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is.

Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.

There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.

a social epidemic, Mavens are data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue: they spread it. But there is also a select group of people — Salesmen — with the skills to persuade us when we are unconvinced of what we are hearing, and they are as critical to the tipping of word-of-mouth epidemics as the other two groups.

They were so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

Two Dutch researchers did a study in which they had groups of students answer forty-two fairly demanding questions from the board game Trivial Pursuit. Half were asked to take five minutes beforehand to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. Those students got 55.6 percent of the questions right. The other half of the students were asked to first sit and think about soccer hooligans. They ended up getting 42.6 percent of the Trivial Pursuit questions right. The “professor” group didn’t know more than the “soccer hooligan” group. They weren’t smarter or more focused or more serious. They were simply in a “smart” frame of mind, and, clearly, associating themselves with the idea of something smart, like a professor, made it a lot easier — in that stressful instant after a trivia question was asked — to blurt out the right answer.