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Malcolm Gladwell [1963-0] Canadian

Rank: 101
Author, Journalist

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell CM is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996.

Health, Medical, Anger, Family, Famous, Imagination, Knowledge, Learning, Money, Romantic, Sports

Quote	Tags	Rank
The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.		101
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.	Money	102
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.		103
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.		104
There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day.	Knowledge, Learning	105
I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church.	Family	106
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.	Health, Medical	107
A runner needs not just to be skinny but - more specifically - to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That's why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect.		108
Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.		109
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.		110
If you go to an elite school where the other students in your class are all really brilliant, you run the risk of mistakenly believing yourself to not be a good student.		111
The underdog winning is the romantic position.	Romantic	112
A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle.		113
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.		114
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?		115
In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles - a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles.		116
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.	Sports	117
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.		118
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.		119
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.	Health, Medical	120
Rarely do we stop and consider whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest.		121
An incredibly high percentage of successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic. That's one of the little-known facts.		122
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.	Health	123
As a writer, the best mindset is to be unafraid.		124
Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.		125
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.		126
We don't know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don't always appreciate their fragility.		201
What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.		202
The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world.	Imagination	203
We aren't, as human beings, very good at acting in our best interest.		204
If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.		205
It's very hard to find someone who's successful and dislikes what they do.		206
I try to be unafraid of making a fool of myself.		207
The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.		208
All my books are optimistic!		209
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.		210
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.		211
I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.		212
Shallow communities are relatively easy to build.		213
Part of me thinks that innovation, real innovation in health care delivery, needs to happen from the bottom to the top.		214
You walk into the class in second grade. You can't read. What are you going to do if you're going to make it? You identify the smart kid. You make friends with him. You sit next to him. You grow a team around you. You delegate your work to others. You learn how to talk your way out of a tight spot.		215
I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research... for ways of augmenting story-telling.		216
Age-class running, as you know, is completely unreliable. It's based on this artificial thing, which is that people who are the same age have the same level of physical maturity. Which just isn't true.		217
Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long.		218
That term, 'David and Goliath,' has entered our language as a metaphor for improbable victories by some weak party over someone far stronger.		219
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.	Famous	220
If I was President of the United States, I'd rather be right than interesting. If I was CEO of a company, I'd rather be right than interesting. But I'm a journalist - what journalist would rather be right than interesting?		221
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.		222
People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.		223
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.		224
The injunction to be nice is used to deflect criticism and stifle the legitimate anger of dissent.	Anger	225
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.		226
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.'		301
An aggressive drug-testing program would cut down on certain abuses, but its never going to catch everyone - or even close to everyone.		302
You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.		303
So, it's a very, you know - maybe we're wrong in - you know, we go around thinking the innovator is the person who's first to kind of conceive of something. And maybe the innovation process continues down the line to the second and the third and the fourth entrant into a field.		304
Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.		305
You think it matters to the kids whether they're learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano?		306
If you're skinny and you can't play hockey in Canada, you aren't left with a lot of options. I was left with running.		307
Take the great example of the four-minute mile. One guy breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone breaks it. And they break it in such a short period of time that it can't be because they were training harder. It's purely that it was a psychological barrier, and someone had to show them that they could do it.		308
When you write about sports, you're allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.		309
If you're last in your class at Harvard, it doesn't feel like you're a good student, even though you really are. It's not smart for everyone to want to go to a great school.		310
If you take away the gift of reading, you create the gift of listening.		311
If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn't read them: You're not the audience!		312
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.		313
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.		314
A handicap is like trying to race and you have a ten pound weight stuck to your waist. That is a handicap.		315
Countless religious innovators over the years have played the game of establishing an identity for themselves by accentuating their otherness.		316
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.		317
The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.		318
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?		319
My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.		320
We should be firing bad teachers.		321
The willingness to be self-critical in England is much greater than the willingness to be self-critical in America.		322
I never had those dreams of making the Olympics. Never.		323
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.		324
I have never read any Tolstoy. I felt badly about this until I read a Bill Simmons column where he confessed that he'd never seen 'The Big Lebowski.' Simmons, it should be pointed out, has seen everything. He said that everyone needs to have skipped at least one great cultural touchstone.		325
My mother read me biblical stories at night.		326
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.		401
Do you remember the wrestler Andre the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly.		402
If you're smarter than me, you shouldn't be reading my books.		403
People assume when my hair is long that I am a lot cooler than I actually am. I am not opposed to this misconception, by the way, but it is a misconception.		404
For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number.		405
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.		406
I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.		407
All three of the great waves of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European immigrants to America innovated.		408
In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.		409
Mainstream American society finds it easiest to be tolerant when the outsider chooses to minimize the differences that separate him from the majority. The country club opens its doors to Jews. The university welcomes African-Americans. Heterosexuals extend the privilege of marriage to the gay community.		410
In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery.		411
I don't think I will ever write about politics or foreign policy. I feel like there is so much good writing in those areas that I have little to add. I also like to steer clear of writing about people whom I do not personally like.		412
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.		413
I don't golf. I've never golfed. I will never golf.		414

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