Blink Quotes

“We need to accept our ignorance and say ‘I don’t know’ more often.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvisers develop action."(p.115)”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that-sometimes-we’re better off that way.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“when you remove time," de becker says, "you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“he waits for the kid to decide whether to pull the gun up or simply to drop it - and all the while, even as he tracks the progress of the gun, he is also watching the kid's face, to see whether he is dangerous or simply frightened. is there a more beautiful example of a snap judgment? this is the gift of training and expertise - the ability to extract an enormous amount of meaningful information from the very thinnest slice of experience.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“They were so focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“In the general American population, 3.9 percent of adult men are six foot two or taller. Among my CEO sample, almost a third were six foot two or taller.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“. . . it is not possible to staff a large company without short people. There simply aren't enough tall people to go around.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“When we talk about analytic versus intuitive decision making, neither is good or bad. What is bad is if you use either of them in an inappropriate circumstance.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

“If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if they added 15% more yellow coloring TO THE PACKAGE.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“There are, I think, two important lessons here. The first is that truly successful decision making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking. [...] The second lesson is that in good decision making, frugality matters”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“the simplest way that respect is communicated is through tone of voice,”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Next time you meet a doctor, and you sit down in his office and he starts to talk, if you have the sense that he isn’t listening to you, that he’s talking down to you, and that he isn’t treating you with respect, listen to that feeling. You have thin-sliced him and found him wanting.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“We have come to confuse information with understanding.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The face is not a secondary billboard for our internal feelings. It is an equal partner in the emotional process.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“The power of knowing, in that first two seconds, is not a gift given magically to a fortunate few. It is an ability that we can all cultivate for ourselves.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that—sometimes—we’re better off that way. 1.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“People are in one of two states in a relationship. The first is what I call positive sentiment override, where positive emotions overrides irritability.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“under time pressure, they began to behave just as people do when they are highly aroused. they stopped relying on the actual evidence of their senses and fell back on a rigid and unyielding system, a stereotype.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“Our unconscious thinking is, in one critical respect, no different from our conscious thinking: in both, we are able to develop our rapid decision making with training and experience.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“If you are a white person who would like to treat black people as equals in every way—who would like to have a set of associations with blacks that are as positive as those that you have with whites—it requires more than a simple commitment to equality. It requires that you change your life so that you are exposed to minorities on a regular basis and become comfortable with them and familiar with the best of their culture, so that when you want to meet, hire, date, or talk with a member of a minority, you aren’t betrayed by your hesitation and discomfort. Taking rapid cognition seriously--acknowledging the incredible power, for good and ill, that first impression play in our lives--requires that we take active steps to manage and control those impressions.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

“[O]ur attitudes towards things like race or gender operate on two levels. First of all, we have our conscious attitudes. This is what we choose to believe. These are our stated values, which we use to direct our behavior deliberately . . . But the IAT [Implicit Association Test] measures something else. It measures our second level of attitude, our racial attitude on an unconscious level - the immediate, automatic associations that tumble out before we've even had time to think. We don't deliberately choose our unconscious attitudes. And . . . we may not even be aware of them. The giant computer that is our unconscious silently crunches all the data it can from the experiences we've had, the people we've met, the lessons we've learned, the books we've read, the movies we've seen, and so on, and it forms an opinion.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking