Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond.

Chamberlain was the only Allied leader of that period to spend any significant time with Hitler.

In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply.

Halifax went to Berlin in the fall of 1937 and met with the German leader at Berchtesgaden: he was the only other member of England's ruling circle to have spent time with the Führer. Their meeting wasn't some meaningless diplomatic reception. It began with Halifax mistaking Hitler for a footman and almost handing him his coat. And then

Los disléxicos compensan su discapacidad desarrollando otras destrezas que —algunas veces— se revelan como destacadas ventajas

Hitler for five hours: sulking, shouting, digressing, denouncing. He talked about how much he hated the press. He talked about the evils of communism. Halifax listened to the performance with what another British diplomat at the time called a "mixture of astonishment, repugnance, and compassion.

La práctica no es lo que uno hace cuando es bueno. Es lo que uno hace para volverse bueno.

Poor parents tend to follow[...] a strategy of accomplishment of natural growth.

In vino veritas: "In wine there is truth.

the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours. This could all be a coincidence, of course. Perhaps Chamberlain and his cohort, for whatever private reason, were determined to see the Hitler they wanted to see, regardless of the evidence of their eyes and ears. Except that the same puzzling pattern crops up everywhere.

Solomon was faced day in, day out with a version of the same problem that had faced Neville Chamberlain and the British diplomatic service in the fall of 1938: he was asked

This is the first of the ideas to keep in mind when considering the death of Sandra Bland. We think we want our guardians to be alert to every suspicion. We blame them when they default to truth. When we try to send people like Graham Spanier to jail, we send a message to all of those in positions of authority about the way we want them to make sense of strangers—without stopping to consider the consequences of sending that message.

to assess the character of a stranger. And the criminal justice system assumes, as Chamberlain did, that those kinds of difficult decisions are better made when the judge and the judged meet each other first.

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

When a liar acts like an honest person, though, or when an honest person acts like a liar, we're flummoxed.

The tax code requires special training.

What we get in exchange for being vulnerable to an occasional lie is efficient communication and social coordination.

the question that my book leaves us with: If David beat Goliath—if, in fact, Davids beat Goliaths all the time, if adversity is a great teacher, if resources ultimately become self-defeating—why doesn't that change the way we make sense of the world?

The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

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 ten." Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out.

that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us.

In Russian folklore there is an archetype called yurodivy, or the "Holy Fool." The Holy Fool is a social misfit—eccentric, off-putting, sometimes even crazy—who nonetheless has access to the truth. Nonetheless is actually the wrong word. The Holy Fool is a truth-teller because he is an outcast. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted.

And for thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college—and having a real shot at the middle class—and not.* "I mean, it's ridiculous," Dhuey says. "It's outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about them.

Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative—to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception—is worse.