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" Take the great example of the four-minute mile. One guy breaks it, then all of a sudden everyone breaks it. And they break it in such a short period of time that it can't be because they were training harder. It's purely that it was a psychological barrier, and someone had to show them that they could do it. "

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

Malcolm Gladwell

Someone

Stronger

Party

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

" Once you understand that Goliath is much weaker than you think he is, and David has superior technology, then you say: why do we tell the story the way we do? It becomes, actually, a far more meaningful and important story in its retelling than in the kind of unsophisticated way we've done it for, I think, too long. "

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

" 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. "

Malcolm Gladwell

Education

You

" There is this tremendous body of knowledge in the world of academia where extraordinary numbers of incredibly thoughtful people have taken the time to examine on a really profound level the way we live our lives and who we are and where we've been. That brilliant learning sometimes gets trapped in academia and never sees the light of day. "

" 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. "

" A lot of what is most beautiful about the world arises from struggle. "

" 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. "

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

" The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct. "

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

" 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 as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. That there is some elemental fairness in everything, which creates the illusion of justice. "

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

" 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. "

Malcolm Gladwell

Great

Service

" You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people who want to help others optimize their physical and psychological health, and then have them run a claims-processing operation for insurance companies. "

" The underdog winning is the romantic position. "

" 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. "

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

" People in great institutions are occasionally credulous. "