Gladwell Books Quotes & Sayings

There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it's the back jacket of books — Malcolm Gladwell

The federal government would give money to the states. States would be able to negotiate at local rates. It's not Medicaid. People didn't want it to be Medicaid in Washington, either. — Maria Cantwell

The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. — Malcolm Gladwell

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. — Malcolm Gladwell

To us Germans everything is religion. What we do we do not merely with our hands and brains, but with our hearts and souls. This has often become a tragic fate for us. — Baldur Von Schirach

[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately . . . But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And . . . we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion. — Malcolm Gladwell

The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating. — Malcolm Gladwell

I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different. — Malcolm Gladwell

Never trust the captain who has never taken any education from the School of Storms! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

All my books are optimistic! — Malcolm Gladwell

That was the turning point. It was as though the signal was there, 'This is the disease you're going to have to work against.' I never really stopped to think about anything else. It was that sudden. — Gertrude B. Elion

Catholic school is similar to apartheid in that it's ruthlessly authoritarian, and its authority rests on a bunch of rules that don't make any sense. — Trevor Noah

I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level. — Malcolm Gladwell

Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless. — Malcolm Gladwell

I have said I have met Satan, and this is true. But it is not tangible. It no more has horns, hooves and a forked tail than God has a long white beard. Even the name, Satan, is just a name we have given to something basically nameless. — M. Scott Peck

If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience! — Malcolm Gladwell

I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms. — Malcolm Gladwell

I think the most important recipe for a good date is just spending time with somebody and really connecting and feeling like the best version of yourself regardless of what you may be doing. — Sophia Bush

You would not seek me if you did not possess me. — Blaise Pascal

Concerted cultivation. He gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp, where he takes classes. When he's bored at home, there are plenty of books to read, and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him. It's not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading and math over the summer. — Malcolm Gladwell

My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that. — Malcolm Gladwell

If you're smarter than me, you shouldn't be reading my books. — Malcolm Gladwell

I never had any great desire to be well-known or to sell a lot of books. ... Maybe that's paradoxically one of the reasons why I've done well. People sense that I'm doing things out of pure enjoyment. I'm not pandering to an audience or following a formula. I'm just writing about cool stuff that interests me, and people respond to that. — Malcolm Gladwell

One is more apt to become wise by doing fool things than by reading wise sayings. — Robert Breault