Quotes from Malcolm Gladwell

When people from organizations like the World Bank descended on Third World countries, they always tried to remove obstacles to development, to reduce economic anxiety and uncertainty.

There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess.

Re-reading is much underrated. I've read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.

Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.

extreme visual clarity, tunnel vision, diminished sound, and the sense that time is slowing down. this is how the human body reacts to extreme stress.

The poorer children were, to her mind, often better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and have a well-developed sense of independence.

My rule is that if I interview someone, they should never read what I have to say about them and regret having given me the interview.

Shallow communities are relatively easy to build.

From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.

In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery.

Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.

Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.

Do you remember the wrestler Andre the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly.

As a writer, the best mindset is to be unafraid.

I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.

I remember as a kid watching one of the Olympic games, and I was cheering for a big track athlete. He was the favorite to win, and he lost. I realized in that moment the pain he felt was so much greater than the pain that those who never thought they were going to win would have felt had they lost.

You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.

If you are going to do something truly innovative, you have to be someone who does not value social approval. You can't need social approval to go forward. Otherwise, how would you ever do the thing that you are doing?

Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.

We aren't, as human beings, very good at acting in our best interest.

I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.

You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people who want to help others optimize their physical and psychological health, and then have them run a claims-processing operation for insurance companies.