Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

what's interesting about that list? Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen

The transparency problem ends up in the same place as the default-to-truth problem. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary.

Montezuma's speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender.

What is required of us is restraint and humility. We can put up barriers on bridges to make it more difficult for that momentary impulse to become permanent. We can instruct young people that the kind of reckless drinking that takes place at a fraternity party makes the task of reading others all but impossible. There are clues to making sense of a stranger. But attending to them requires care and attention

If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy. (Chinese proverb)

David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That's how people with brains a

Summer vacation is a topic seldom mentioned in American educational debates. It is considered a permanent and inviolate feature of school life, like high school football or the senior prom.

point. 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.

But in other aspects of our lives, I'm not sure we always respect the mysteries of the locked door and the dangers of the storytelling problem. There are times when we demand an explanation when an explanation really isn't possible, and, as we'll explore in the upcoming chapters of this book, doing so can have serious consequences.

Bill Joy got an extraordinary, early opportunity to learn programming on a time-share system as a freshman in college, in 1971. Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968.

Mission with LeMay

to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.

would listen to the radio on Sundays as the announcer read the comics aloud, and he would follow along on his own until he had

We associate the willingness to risk great failure and the ability to climb back from catastrophe with courage, but in this, we are wrong. That is the lesson of Taleb and Niederhoffer, and also the lesson of our volatile times. There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures.

an airplane hangar. The man from Hollywood had too much money. That was his

None of those things, though, will improve her math and reading skills, and every carefree summer day she spends puts her further and further behind Alex.

relative deprivation

Or, as the English essayist Thomas De Quincey famously put it: "It is, or it is not, according to the nature of men, an advantage to be orphaned at an early age.

The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. In front that falls a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand the stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers's with caution and humility.

What they did is not "right," just as it is not "right" to send children up against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others.

The standard immigrant-entrepreneur story is about the redemptive power of grit and ingenuity.

ensure that your aircraft will not penetrate this area.

Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false, or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false. It leaves out my mother's many opportunities and the importance of her cultural legacy.