Revenge of the Tipping Point Quotes

“Epidemics have rules. They have boundaries. They are subject to overstories—and we are the ones who create overstories. They change in size and shape when they reach a tipping point—and it is possible to know when and where those tipping points are. They are driven by a number of people, and those people can be identified. The tools necessary to control an epidemic are sitting on the table, right in front of us. We can let the unscrupulous take them. Or we can pick them up ourselves, and use them to build a better world.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Think about the psychology of that kind of change. “If you’re just below that tipping point—you’re at 20 percent—you have no idea how close you are,” Centola says. In one of the versions of his game, with twenty people, having four dissidents didn’t make the slightest difference. But when he added one more—bringing the outsiders up to the magic 25 percent mark—the consensus abruptly shifted. “You don’t know that [with] one or two more people, you could trigger that tipping point,” he said. If change happened gradually, you could see that you were getting closer and closer to your goal—and you wouldn’t be surprised when you reached it. But if nothing happens and then everything happens, you are in the strange position of being discouraged during the long stretch when nothing is happening and stunned at the point when it all shifts.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“When a woman is all alone, she stands out as a woman, but she becomes invisible as a person.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“If the world can be moved by just the slightest push, then the person who knows where and when to push has real power. So who are those people? What are their intentions? What techniques are they using? In the world of law enforcement, the word forensic refers to an investigation of the origins and scope of a criminal act: “reasons, culprits, and consequences.” Revenge of the Tipping Point is an attempt to do a forensic investigation of social epidemics.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“The best solution to a monoculture epidemic is to break up the monoculture.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“I always like to quote this line from. Of Scottish writer Andrew Fletcher. “If I can write the songs of a nation, I don't care who writes their laws.” We need to pay more attention to the songs we're singing.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“The magic third turns up in all kinds of places. Take corporate boards, for example. They're among the most powerful institutions in the modern economy. Virtually every company of consequence has a group of typically around 9 experienced business people who provide guidance to the chief executive officer. Historically, boards have been all male, but slowly doors have opened to women and a body of research shows that having women on a board makes the board different. The research suggests that women on boards are more willing to ask difficult questions. They value collaboration more. They're better listeners. In other words, there's a woman effect. But how many women do you need on a board to get the woman effect? It isn't One…. It's just like Cantor predicted. When a woman is all alone, she stands out as a woman, but she becomes invisible as a person. Adding a second woman clearly helps, The study goes on, but it still wasn't enough. The magic seems to occur when three or more women serve on a board together. Three out of nine people. That magic third!”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Moving from the position that a problem belongs to all of us to the position that a problem is being caused by a few of us is really difficult.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“In medicine there is a term for the kind of illness that is caused by the intervention of doctors: iatrogenesis. You treat someone with a drug, and the side effects turn out to be worse than the disease. You do a minor operation, and the patient dies of complications. Iatrogenic illness is well-intentioned. No one is trying to harm the patient. But a doctor has no right to use the passive voice and speak of the patient who has been harmed.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“In the end, nearly everyone was in agreement. Something dramatic happened when a once-insignificant set of outsiders reached between one-quarter and one-third of the population of whatever group they were joining.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“But what you give up in a world of uniformity is resilience.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“They had to figure out a way to characterize me in some special way because I was with them—and I was not meant to be with them.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“If change happened gradually, you could see that you were getting closer and closer to your goal- and you wouldn't be surprised when you reached it. But if nothing happens and then everything happens, you are in the strange position of being discouraged during the long stretch when nothing is happening and stunned at the point when it all shifts.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Liberals, moderates and conservatives in most cases disagreed strongly on hot button issues only if they didn't watch a lot of television. But the more television people of all ideological persuasions watched, the more they started to agree. When a large group of people watched the same stories night after night, it brings them together. Here’s Gross again, “it's not the media pushing this button to get that effect. Its media is creating the cultural consciousness about how the world works.” The stories told on television shaped the kinds of things people thought about the conversations they had, the things they valued. The things they dismissed and that shared experience was so powerful and transformative that knowing how much television someone watched was a better predictor of how they saw current issues than knowing who they voted for in the last election.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“I think we can go one step further. I think we can call the Magic Third a universal law. (Or at least something very close to universal.)”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Adding a second woman clearly helps,” the study goes on. But it still wasn’t enough: The magic seems to occur when three or more women serve on a board together. Three out of nine people. The Magic Third!”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“In Chapter 4, I talked about the strange dynamics of tipping points found in Damon Centola’s name game. Centola wanted to know how many “dissidents” it would take to disrupt a consensus reached by the majority. And his answer was, It doesn’t take a lot. Once 25 percent of the members of any group start pushing for a new name, the rest of the group quickly folds its cards and goes along.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“If you read your contract closely, it says that the show is to be ninety minutes in length. It is to cost X. That’s the budget. Nowhere in that do we ever say that it has to be good. And if you are so robotic and driven that you feel the pressure to push yourself in that way to make it good, don’t come to us and say you’ve been treated unfairly, because you’re trying hard to make it good and we’re getting in your way. Because at no point did we ask for it to be good. That you’re neurotic is a bonus to us. Our job is to lie, cheat, and steal—and your job is to do the show.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“That’s the revenge of the Tipping Point: The very same tools we use to build a better world can also be used against”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Communities have their own stories, and those stories are contagious.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“The overstory is made up of things way up in the air”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“the world can be moved by just the slightest push”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“I got a cat and named him Biggie Smalls.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“[It is] very hard to accept...the story that we tell ourselves that we bear no responsibility for the epidemics that surround us — that they come out of nowhere, that they should always surprise us.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“A duo called the Nasty Boys did almost thirty takeovers in under a year—just the two of them. The Nasty Boys were… nasty:”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“Casper taught his recruits a technique he called “goin’ kamikaze.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“iatrogenesis.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“embarrassed by their accents. They were embarrassed by their tattoos. They were embarrassed that their children didn’t have grandparents or family members at the school plays that every other kid had.”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering

“What if age and obesity really are the two biggest predictors of super spreading? Does that mean that in the middle of a pandemic, passengers will refuse to sit next to overweight people? On a plane, what if the answer is viscous saliva and someone comes up with a 10 second test to measure if someone is in the 99th percentile? Would a restaurant or a movie theater or a church be justified in asking everyone at the door to take a saliva test and then turn away those whose results fall at the extreme end?”
― Malcolm Gladwell, Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering