Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.

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.

"when you remove time," de becker says, "you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction"

[Practical intelligence is] practical in nature: that is, it's now knowledge for its own sake. It's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.

Transparency is the idea that people’s behavior and demeanor — the way they represent themselves on the outside — provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside.

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.

Education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder

Gifted children and child prodigies seem most likely to emerge in highly supportive family conditions.In contrast, geniuses have a perverse tendency of growing up in more adverse conditions.

Working really hard is what successful people do,

Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.

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

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Defaulting to truth is a problem. It lets spies and con artists roam free.

Living a long life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended to a great extent on who we were — that is, our genes. It depended on the decisions we made — on what we chose to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was used to thinking about health in terms of community.

It is a strange thing, isn’t it, to have an educational philosophy that thinks of the other students in the classroom with your child as competitors for the attention of the teacher and not allies in the adventure of learning?