Quotes from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures

Malcolm Gladwell ·  444 pages

Rating: (74.6K votes)


“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“Nothing frustrates me more than someone who reads something of mine or anyone else's and says, angrily, 'I don't buy it.' Why are they angry? Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head—even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you'd really like to be.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small differences: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures



“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade...It succeeds or fails on the strength of its ability to engage you, to make you think, to give you a glimpse into someone else's head - even if in the end you conclude that someone else's head is not a place you're really like to be.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“Happiness, in one sense, is a function of how closely our world conforms to the infinite variety of human preference.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“I think when one's working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dallop of each.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures



“Words belong to the person who wrote them”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“There is more courage and heroism in defying the human impulse, in taking the purposeful and painful steps to prepare for the unimaginable.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure—and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“Taleb likes to invoke
Popper: 'No amount of observations
of white swans can allow the inference
that all swans are white, but the observation
of a single black swan is sufficient
to refute that conclusion.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“If a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures



“Everything that can be tested must be tested,”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“hey hey its Brooke im 12 and having trouble my teacher told me to get on here sooo yaaa see ya soon pic uplaodin soon!!!!!!!!!!!!”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it's just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen. (p313)”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people… and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition, narcissists tend to “self-nominate”; consequently, when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures



“In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree — and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“The talent myth assumes that people make organizations smart. More often than not, it’s the other way around.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“That late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren't much good until late in their careers.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“People at the top are self-conscious about what they say (and rightfully so) because they have position and privilege to protect — and self-consciousness is the enemy of “interestingness.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“You can take a pitchman and make a great actor out of him, but you cannot take an actor and always make a great pitchman out of him,” he says. The pitchman must make you applaud and take out your money. He must be able to execute what in pitchman’s parlance is called “the turn” — the perilous, crucial moment where he goes from entertainer to businessman.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures



“to succeed in the world he could not be just a dog whisperer. He needed to be a people whisperer.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“You don’t start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it’s the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“A certain property fundamentalism, having no connection to our tradition, now reigns in this culture.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


“The trick to finding ideas is to convince yourself that everyone and everything has a story to tell. I say trick but what I really mean is challenge, because it’s a very hard thing to do.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, quote from What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures


About the author

Malcolm Gladwell
Born place: in London, England, The United Kingdom
Born date September 3, 1963
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Popular quotes

“Bir şeyi yapmanın en çabuk, en kolay ve en ucuz yolu ilk seferinde düzgün yapmaktır.”
― K.J. Parker, quote from Devices and Desires


“Perhaps the most amazing practitioner of echolocation among humans is Daniel Kish, blind since he was one year old, who early in life discovered that making clicking noises helped him get around. Much of his brain must be reassigned to sound, because he uses his own clicks to navigate. He can ride a bicycle in traffic (hard to imagine), and he has founded World Access for the Blind to teach other blind people to use their own sonar—to summon, as it were, their inner dolphin. Sounds from his tongue clicks, he explains, “bounce off surfaces all around and return to my ears as faint echoes. My brain processes the echoes into dynamic images.… I construct a three-dimensional image of my surroundings for hundreds of feet in every direction. Up close, I can detect a pole an inch thick. At 15 feet, I recognize cars and bushes. Houses come into focus at 150 feet.” This is all so hard to imagine, people have wondered if he is telling the truth. But he’s not alone, and his claims appear to check out. He says, “Many students are surprised how quickly results come. I believe echolocation capacity is latent within us.… The neural hardware seems to be there; I’ve developed ways to activate it. Vision isn’t in the eyes; it’s in the mind.” So, is it possible that a dolphin such as a killer whale might actually see the echoes?”
― Carl Safina, quote from Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel


“did tell him. I suppose he thought it wasn’t suitable for your ears.” I swallowed. “What happened then?” “Rose’s boy got caught with the Resistance. They shipped him off, who knows where. Half of Paris was disappearing overnight. Rose probably would have too—she’d already nearly been arrested for kicking a Brownshirt on the Rue de Rivoli, so we brought her back here to Rouen. But . . .”
― Kate Quinn, quote from The Alice Network


“So it is with Moslem women and their veils,’ Michelangelo said. ‘When they saw Muhammad’s wives wearing veils, they sought to imitate them, and so now nearly all Islamic women wear veils even though there is no stipulation in their Holy Koran that they do so.”
― Matthew Reilly, quote from The Tournament


“Don't trust the fire, for it will burn you.
Don't trust the ice, for it will freeze you.
Don't trust the water, for it will drown you.
Don't trust the air, for it will choke you.
Don't trust the earth, for it will bury you.
Don't trust the trees, for they will rip you,
rend you, tear you, kill you dead.”
― Sarah Beth Durst, quote from The Queen of Blood


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