These are the quotes I noted while reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell:
- The success of any king of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
- You know Darwin’s terms about the survival of the fittest? We had a mechanism to identify the fittest and decide what should survive.
- All of us, when it comes to personality, naturally think in terms of absolutes: that a person is a certain way or is not a certain way. But what Zimbardo and Hartshorne and May are suggesting is that this is a mistake, that when we think only in terms of inherent traits and forget the role of situations, we’re deceiving ourselves about the real causes of human behavior.
- The essential contrariness of adolescents suggests that the more adults inveigh against smoking and lecture teenagers about its dangers, the more teens, paradoxically, will want to try it.