Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

But let's not forget that if you are reading this book, then you are a reader and that means you've probably never had to think of all the shortcuts and strategies and bypasses that exist to get around reading

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

One of the most important tools in contemporary educational research is value added analysis.

High-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief: they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential.

power has an important limitation. It has to be seen as legitimate, or else its use has the opposite of its intended effect.

Somewhere in retirement, Haywood Hansell saw that announcement in the newspaper, and I'm sure he wondered why he didn't get an award as well for the effort he put toward fighting a war with as few civilian casualties as possible. But we don't give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.

There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it's the back jacket of books

The death of Sandra Bland is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers.

We think we can transform the stranger, without cost or sacrifice, into the familiar and the known, and we can't.

They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten." Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.

And everyone knows that it's better to have an expert show you -- and not just tell you -- how to play tennis or golf or a musical instrument. We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instructions.

learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same thing happens, and they do even better again. The only country we don't see this going on is Denmark. They have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of

look at the last column, which totals up all the summer gains from first grade to fifth grade. The reading scores of the poor kids go up by .26 points. When it comes to reading skills, poor kids learn nothing when school is not in session. The reading scores of the rich kids, by contrast, go up by a whopping 52.49 points. Virtually

You see the giant and the shepherd in the Valley of Elah and your eye is drawn to the man with the 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.

You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.

But what actually matters are the hundreds of small things that the powerful do—or don't do—to establish their legitimacy, like sleeping in the bed of an innocent man you just shot accidentally and scattering your belongings around his house.

If you paid careful attention to the structure and format of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness.

Prejudice and incompetence go a long way toward explaining social dysfunction in the United States.

The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters—first and foremost—how they behave. This is called the "principle

I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.

Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.

What Jaffe proved was that the powerful have to worry about how others think of them-that those who give orders are acutely vulnerable to the opinions of those whom they are ordering about.

We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world.