Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

And why? Because

Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.

Bruhn still had a sense of amazement in his voice as

take control of the machinery of achievement, in other words—not just in sports but, as we

Would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon? Of course not. And that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan. It's because he possessed the kind of savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world.

When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.

his students and colleagues from Oklahoma. They gathered together the death certificates from residents of

Wealthy people get special insider deals, and if you and I lived in a country where the tax system was so blatantly illegitimate—where nothing seemed fair, and where our voices weren't heard, and where the rules changed from one day to the next—we wouldn't pay our taxes either.

town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of

Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of Foggia. In the style of medieval villages

Judgment matters: it is what separates winners from losers.

But the truth is that for the most important decisions, there can be no certainty

in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the skilled, the talented, and the driven—I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success.

When [Sylvia] Plath committed suicide, the suicide rate for women of her age in England reached a staggering 10 per 100,000. Driven by a tragically high number of deaths by gas poisoning. That is as high as the suicide rate for women in England has ever been. By 1977 when the Natural Gas changeover was complete, the suicide rate for young woman was half that.

The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

does not believe that consumers — even spaghetti lovers — know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist.

The studies show essentially that a child is better off in a good neighborhood in a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood in a good family.

Words belong to the person who wrote them. There are few simpler ethical notions than this one, particularly as society directs more and more energy and resources toward the creation of intellectual property.

Era un ejemplo de cómo los fuera de serie de un campo particular alcanzaban el estatus más alto mediante una combinación de capacidad, oportunidad y ventaja completamente arbitraria

When the police cracked down, did the sex workers simply move one or two streets over? ... Was there displacement? There was not. It turns out that most [sex workers] would rather try something else, leave the field entirely, change their behavior, than shift their location.

This book was written in service to my obsessions. But it is also a story about other people's obsessions

Aviation experts will tell you that it is the success of this war on mitigation as much as anything else that accounts for the extraordinary decline in airline accidents in recent years.

Now let's do the same kind of analysis for people like

What Borgenicht was getting in his eighteen-hour days was a lesson in the modern economy. He was learning market research. He was learning manufacturing. He was learning how to negotiate with imperious Yankees. He was learning how to plug himself into popular culture in order to understand new fashion trends.