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

Malcolm Gladwell

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Malcolm Gladwell
Age: 61
Born: 1963
Born: September 3
Journalist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell
Dissent
Legitimate
Anger
Criticism
Nice
Used
Deflect
Injunction
Stifle

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If you think advantage lies in resources, then you think the best educational system is the one that spends the most money.
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It's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani.
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We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future.
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Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.
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The religious paradigm and the science fiction paradigm are different. Apologies to science fiction fans, but the paradigm there is to create a new world and describe it with a kind of specificity that we describe the world we inhabit. Religiosity, on the other hand, does none of that.
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Flom had the same experience...He didn't triumph over adversity. Instead, what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.
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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.
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Clear writing is universal. People talk about writing down to an audience or writing up to an audience I think that's nonsense. If you write in a way that is clear, transparent, and elegant, it will reach everyone.
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So long as the stereotype is used as a way of understanding how to fix the problem as opposed to demonizing a people or writing them off, then I think it's OK.
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Consistency is the most overrated of all human virtues... I'm someone who changes his mind all the time.
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I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible.
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Incompetence annoys me. Overconfidence terrifies me.
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It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.
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There’s this powerful phrase in the legal world, “Difficult cases make bad law.” The exception is the difficult case. You can’t generalize them by definition. So although they are fascinating, they don’t solve any problem because they’re so one of a kind.
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If you look at the careers of great entrepreneurs and you look at the moment they took their plunge, the plunge is rarely a great financial or material risk, it’s a social risk. At the moment they started their new businesses, everyone around them said ‘you’re an idiot’.
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The difference isn't resources, it's attitude.
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The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.
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Courage is what you earn when you've been through the tough times and you discover they aren't so tough after all.
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People are experience-rich and theory-poor. I help people organize / make sense of their experiences.
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Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
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