Malcolm Gladwell Quotes
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The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.
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If you're smarter than me, you shouldn't be reading my books.
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Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.
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We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.
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All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.
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If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!
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The great accomplishment of Jobs's life is how effectively he put his idiosyncrasies - his petulance, his narcissism, and his rudeness - in the service of perfection.
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It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.
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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
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In my mid-adolescence, my friend Terry Martin and I became obsessed with William F. Buckley. This makes more sense when you realize that we were living in Bible Belt farming country miles from civilization. Buckley seemed impossibly exotic.
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We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.
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People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.
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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.
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Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.
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That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.
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You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano?
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The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.
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The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.
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I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.
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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.
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If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.
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Shallow communities are relatively easy to build.
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I'm a lot more interested in people than I used to be. I used to be most interested in abstract ideas, and people were an afterthought, but that's changed a bit.
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The fact of being an underdog changes people in ways that we often fail to appreciate. It opens doors and creates opportunities and enlightens and permits things that might otherwise have seemed unthinkable.