Malcolm Gladwell

“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.”

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

“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...”

“My books have contradictions all the time - and people are fine with that.”

“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.”

“People in great institutions are occasionally credulous.”

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

“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...”

“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...”

“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.”

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

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

“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 deliv...”

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

“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. Th...”

“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 se...”

“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 u...”

“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 fr...”

“We should be firing bad teachers.”

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