Quotes 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.”
― 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

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Popular quotes

“Nicholas Temelcoff is famous on the bridge, a daredevil. He is given all the difficult jobs and he takes them. He descends into the air with no fear. He is a solitary. He assembles ropes, brushes the tackle and pulley at his waist, and falls off the bridge like a diver over the edge of a boat.”
― Michael Ondaatje, quote from In the Skin of a Lion

“Steadfast as the points of the compass to Mrs. Arbuthnot were the great four facts of life: God, Husband, Home, Duty. She had gone to sleep on these facts years ago, after a period of much misery, her head resting on them as on a pillow; and she had a great dread of being awakened out of so simple and untroublesome a condition.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, quote from The Enchanted April

“If one could only get out of a grief as one gets out of a city!”
― Victor Hugo, quote from The Man Who Laughs

“...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.”
― Jonathan Tropper, quote from This is Where I Leave You

“So the chemical
properties of a substance depend only on a number, the number of electrons. (The
whole list of elements of the chemists really could have been called 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,
etc. Instead of saying "carbon," we could say "element six," meaning six electrons,
but of course, when the elements were first discovered, it was not known that they
could be numbered that way, and secondly, it would make everything look rather
complicated. It is better to have names and symbols for these things, rather than
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― Richard Feynman, quote from The Feynman Lectures on Physics

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