Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

statement. They also made a technical skate

The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered.

Marita doesn't need a brand-new school with acres of playing fields and gleaming facilities. She doesn't need a laptop, a smaller class, a teacher with a PhD, or a bigger apartment. She doesn't need a hight IQ or a mind as quick as Chris Langan's. All those things would be nice, of course. But they miss the point. Marita just need a chance. And look at the chance she was given! Someone brought a little bit of the rice paddy to the South Bronx and explained to her the miracle of meaningful work.

When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced. They went to conferences where their peers were presenting long rows of data arrayed in

Stouffer's point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people "in the same boat as ourselves." Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations.

In attempting to wipe out the Huguenots, the French created instead a pocket in their own country that was all but impossible to wipe out.

conviction that we know others better than they know us—and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa)—leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

First there is default to truth, which gives the con artist a head start. But when you add mismatch to that, it's not hard to understand why Madoff fooled so many for so long.

In Mexico, on his grandfather's farm, dogs were dogs and humans were humans: each knew its place. But in America, dogs were treated like children, and owners had shaken up the hierarchy of human and animal.

We have, I think, a very rigid and limited definition of what an advantage is.

Transparency is the idea that people's behavior and demeanor—the way they represent themselves on the outside—provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. It is the second of the crucial tools we use to make sense of strangers. When we don't know someone, or can't communicate with them, or don't have the time to understand them properly, we believe we can make sense of them through their behavior and demeanor.

Neither Masten nor Rhea believes that clever packaging allows a company to put out a bad-tasting product. The taste of the product itself matters a great deal. Their point is simply that when we put something in our mouth and in that blink of an eye decide whether it tastes good or not, we are reacting not only to the evidence from our taste buds and salivary glands but also to the evidence of our eyes and memories and imaginations

with strangers, we're intolerant of emotional responses that fall outside expectations.

Proficimus more irretenti:

The conviction that we know others better than they know us - and that we may have insights about them they lack (but not vice versa) - leads us to talk when we would do well to listen and to be less patient than we ought to be when others express the conviction that they are the ones who are being misunderstood or judged unfairly.

because when you run a business, five to six percent of your revenues are going to be lost to theft. That's the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners' statistics.

Stouffer's point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people "in the same boat as ourselves." Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is

contraption that you could assemble at home. The headline on the story read: "PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH! World's

Although the Hotchkiss website claims to have twelve Steinway pianos, the school's music director has said elsewhere that they actually have twenty—plus a Fazioli, which is the Rolls-Royce of performance grand pianos. That's more than a million dollars' worth of pianos. If you are playing "Chopsticks" in a Hotchkiss practice room, it's going to sound really good.

Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course.

There is something about the idea of coupling—of the notion that a stranger's behavior is tightly connected to place and context—that eludes us. It leads us to misunderstand some of our greatest poets, to be indifferent to the suicidal, and to send police officers on senseless errands. So what happens when a police officer carries that fundamental misconception—and then you add to that the problems of default to truth and transparency? You get Sandra Bland. 1

But as is so often the case with outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.

program and not. "It's just like sports," Dhuey said. "We do ability grouping early on in childhood. We have advanced reading groups and advanced math groups. So, early on, if we look at young kids, in kindergarten

Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating.