Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

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

"A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle."

"The underdog winning is the romantic position."

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

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

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

"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."

"I don't want a door bell. I don't want anyone ringing my door bell... seems to be intrusive. They can call me on their cell phones."

"I try to be unafraid of making a fool of myself."

"We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility."

"An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts."

"The most common form of giantism is a condition called acromegaly, and acromegaly is caused by a benign tumor on your pituitary gland that causes an overproduction of human growth hormone. And throughout history, many of the most famous giants have all had acromegaly."

"There is an important idea in psychology: The 'just world theory,' which says that it is very important for us to convince ourselves that the world is just and things happen for a reason. That there is some elemental fairness in everything, which creates the illusion of justice."

"If Harvard is $60,000 and University of Toronto, where I went to school, is maybe six. So you're really telling me that education is 10 times better at Harvard than it is at University of Toronto? That seems ridiculous to me."

"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."

"The paradox of endurance sports is that an athlete can never work as hard as he wants, because if he pushes himself too far, his hematocrit will fall."

"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."

"I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never."

"We used to say poor people had lousy genes. Then we decided that wasn't OK, but we transferred the prejudice to upbringing. We said, 'You were neglected as a child, so you'll never make it.' That's just as pernicious."

"I'm just trying to say that it should reassure us that the inevitable traumas of being human do end up producing some good. Otherwise, the human condition is overwhelmingly depressing."

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

"There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria."

"It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do."

"I don't understand, given the constraints physicians have in doing their job and the paperwork demanded of them, why people want to be physicians. I think we've made it very, very difficult for them to perform their job. I think that's a shame."

"When I go to my health club, and it's in the basement, you have to take the elevator down. And this drives me crazy. Why can't there be a stairway? At least make it as easy to exercise as it is to not exercise. It's in society's interest for me to take the stairs."

"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."

"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."

"The best example of how impossible it will be for Major League Baseball to crack down on steroids is the fact that baseball and the media are still talking about the problem as 'steroids.'"

"An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone."

"Does that mean we should give up? Probably. But there are two issues worth considering. The first is - is it really true that drugs destroy the integrity of the game?"