Acquaintances, in sort, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are.

— Malcolm Gladwell

A man employs the full power of the state in his grief and ends up plunging his government into a fruitless and costly experiment. A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive - and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down. - Chapter 8

— Malcolm Gladwell

A woman who walks away from the promise of power finds the strength to forgive – and saves her friendship, her marriage, and her sanity. The world is turned upside down.

— Malcolm Gladwell

Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action."(p.115)

— Malcolm Gladwell

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice--perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again--and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court. . . . Spontaneity isn't random.

— Malcolm Gladwell

Contagiousness is an unexpected property of all kinds of things.

— Malcolm Gladwell

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them.

— Malcolm Gladwell

Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma? And the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places however when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences. ... [Dr. Cranach] understood from his own childhood experiences that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.

— Malcolm Gladwell

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

— Malcolm Gladwell

Economists often talk about the 80/20 Principle, which is the idea that in any situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants. In most societies, 20 percent of criminals commit 80 percent of crimes. Twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of all accidents. Twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of all beer. When it comes to epidemics, though, this disproportionality becomes even more extreme: a tiny percentage of people do the majority of the work.

— Malcolm Gladwell