Top 60 Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

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.

I am far more distress-avoidant than I am joy-seeking.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 don’t golf. I’ve never golfed. I will never golf.

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.

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.

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

If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.

Do you remember the wrestler Andre the Giant? Famous. He had acromegaly.

From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I am a story-teller, and I look to academic research… for ways of augmenting story-telling.

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.

Of the great entrepreneurs of this era, people will have forgotten Steve Jobs.

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

In the government’s eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

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

If you’re smarter than me, you shouldn’t be reading my books.

Many people with dyslexia truly suffer, and their lives are worse off for having had that disability.

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.

If my books appear to a reader to be oversimplified, then you shouldn’t read them: You’re not the audience!

The underdog winning is the romantic position.

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.

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

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.

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.

My mother read me biblical stories at night.

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.

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.

I grew up in southwestern Ontario in the heart of a Mennonite community. All my family are part of the Mennonite church.

All my books are optimistic!

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.

I wrote my first book when I was in my late thirties.

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.

My books have contradictions all the time – and people are fine with that.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

You think it matters to the kids whether they’re learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano?

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?

People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.

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.

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.

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 you write about sports, you’re allowed to engage in mischief. Nothing is at stake.

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

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

The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.

The most influential thinker, in my life, has been the psychologist Richard Nisbett. He basically gave me my view of the world.