Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

One of the most important things is that you have to come across as being confident in what you are doing, and in who you are. How do you do that? Speak clearly and smile.' As he said that, Nolan Myers smiled. 'For a lot of people, that's a very hard skill to learn, but for some reason, I seem to understand it intuitively.

look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on

This doesn't mean affirmative action is wrong. It is something done with the best of intentions, and elite schools often have resources available to help poor students that other schools do not. But this does not change the fact that -- as Herbert Marsh says -- the blessings of the Big Pond are mixed, and it is strange how rarely the Big Pond's downsides are mentioned.

Outlier (noun): 1. Something that is situated away from, or classed differently from, a main or related body. 2. A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.

His story was almost word for word the same as Caroline Sack's, and hearing it a second time made it plain how remarkable the achievement of the Impressionists really was. They were artistic geniuses. But they were also possessed of a rare wisdom about the world. They were capable of looking at what the rest of us thought of as a great advantage, and seeing it for what it really was. Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, and Pissarro would have gone to their second choice.

fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years—that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the precise southern

Hard work is a prison only if it does not have meaning

Palestine is the region known as the Shephelah, a series of ridges and valleys connecting the Judaean

American, Swiss, and Japanese taxpayers are pretty honest. So are most of the other Western European democracies. Greece, Spain, and Italy are not. In fact, the level of tax evasion in Greece is such that the country's deficit—which is so large that Greece has teetered on the brink of outright bankruptcy for years—would all but disappear if Greek citizens obeyed the law and paid what they owed.

The Rosetons were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills…The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with has a profound effect on who we are.

Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591. The author is grateful for permission to use the following copyrighted material: American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, 2005 Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, by Annette Lareau

Number four was that Gates just happened to find out about ISI, and ISI just happened to need someone to work on its payroll software.

Reaching the consumer with the message is not the hard part of direct marketing. What is difficult is getting consumers to stop, read the advertisement, remember it, and then act on it.

Art thou not he? Art thou Montezuma?

An adult considers constant repetition boring, because it requires reliving the same experience over and over again. But to preschoolers repetition isn't boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way.

We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching. If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the order to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the order received, and we would try to hide them as best we could. We have Jews. You're not getting them.

What my research with priming race and test performance, and Bargh's research with the interrupters, and Maier's experiment with the ropes show is that people are ignorant of the things that affect their actions, yet they rarely feel ignorant. We need to accept our ignorance and say 'I don't know' more often.

The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what psychologist Robert Sternberg calls 'practical intelligence'. To Sternberg, 'practical intelligence' includes things like: knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.

when explorers began traveling across oceans and undertaking bold expeditions in previously unknown territory, an entirely new kind of encounter emerged. Cortés and Montezuma wanted to have a conversation, even though they knew nothing about the other. When

Everything we have learned in Outliers say that success follows a predictable course. It's not the brightest who succeed; if it were, Chris Langan would be up there with Einstein, nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift: The successful are those who have been given opportunities, and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

The world - much as we want it to - does not accord with our intuition.

and if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.

doubts trigger disbelief only when you can't explain them away.

As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, "painting with a broad brush" is "an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.