David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

by Malcolm Gladwell

“If more than two percent of the neighborhood goes to prison,” Clear concluded, “the effect on crime starts to reverse.”

This final lesson about the limits of power is not easy to learn. It requires that those in positions of authority accept that what they thought of as their greatest advantage—the fact that they could search as many homes as they wanted and arrest as many people as they wanted and

imprison people

doing to others what he did to Candace.” 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.

On the Sunday after France fell to the Germans, Trocmé preached a sermon at the Protestant temple of Le Chambon. “Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty,” he said. “Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly.

We feel obliged to tell you that there are among us a certain number of Jews. But, we make no distinction between Jews and non-Jews. It is contrary to the Gospel teaching. If our comrades, whose only fault is to be born in another religion, received the order to let themselves be deported, or even examined, they would disobey the order received, and we would try to hide them as best we could. We have Jews. You’re not getting them.

The powerful are not as powerful as they seem—nor the weak as weak.

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.

Even today I carry a death within myself, the death of my son, and I am like a decapitated pine. Pine trees do not regenerate their tops. They stay twisted, crippled.

Vietnam had been divided into two in 1954—with Chinese-backed communists controlling the North and a pro-Western regime based in Saigon running the South—

California think tank the RAND Corporation out of their Saigon office at 176 Rue Pasteur.

A million dollars in 1964—particularly in a country as impoverished as Vietnam—was a king’s ransom. And thus was the Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Project born.

When the Pentagon would finally make the rue Pasteur archive public, the transcripts would total sixty-one thousand pages—a gold mine of information.

With no personal benefit, except this cause that he called ‘the just cause’—reunifying Vietnam, throwing out the Americans, setting up a government that would bring economic and social political justice.

that having too much money and matériel is as debilitating as having too little. Being an underdog—having nothing to lose—opens up possibilities.

But the minute Hitler became chancellor, Kellen packed his bags and fled and did not return to his homeland until the war was over. “I had a feeling,” he said, “right from the beginning . . . that Hitler would last, at least long enough to destroy or ruin millions of lives.” Most of Kellen’s contemporaries did not share his feeling about Hitler. They were comfortable and privileged and didn’t feel they had to pay attention to the lunatic on their doorstep.

Understanding the power of the underdog requires an effort. It requires standing up to conventional wisdom. It was