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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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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All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.
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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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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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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
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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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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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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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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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The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.
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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?
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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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People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.
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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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I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.
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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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We aren't, as human beings, very good at acting in our best interest.
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If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.
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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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In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.