Malcolm Gladwell

If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.

The biggest mistake we make is trying to square the way we feel about something today with the way we felt about it yesterday. You shouldn’t even bother doing it. You should just figure out the way you feel today and if it happens to comply with what you thought before, fine. If it contradicts it, whatever. Life goes on.

The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.

If we think about emotion this way - as outside-in, not inside out - it is possible to understand how some people can have an enormous amount of influence over others. Some of us, after all, are very good at expressiing emotions and feelings, which means that we are far more emotionally contagious than the rest of us.

The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances.

For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number.

That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.

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 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.

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

Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung...We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.

A handicap is like trying to race and you have a ten pound weight stuck to your waist. That is a handicap.

Poverty is not deprivation, it is isolation.

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.

We all assume that if you're weak and poor, you're never going to win. In fact, the real world is full of examples where the exact opposite happens, where the weak win and the strong screw up.

The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

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.

The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom.

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.

I've had the most untraumatic life a human being can have. But I've always been drawn to those who have had far more complicated histories.