Quotes from Malcom Gladwell

The Law of the Few says that there are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them. The lesson of stickiness is the same. There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it.

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

When you have nothing to lose, you have the freedom to thumb your nose at the rules set by others.

Good writing does not fail or succeed on the strength of its ability to persuade. Not the kind of writing that you'll find in this book, anyway. 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 someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be. from intro to What The Dog Saw

We do ability grouping early on in childhood...if we look at young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers are confusing maturity with ability.

Just dumb enough to be fearless, just bright enough to be dangerous, and a dead shot.

The gold box...was a kind of trigger. It gave viewers a reason to look for the ads in TV Guide and Parade. It created a connection between the Columbia message viewers saw on television and the message they read in a magazine. The gold box...made the reader / viewer part of an interactive advertising system. Viewers were not just an audience but had become participants. It was like playing a game...

For every romantic possiblity, no matter how robust, there exists at least one equal and opposite sentence, phrase, or word capable of extinguishing it.