Great Throughts Treasury

"The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families."

"The three rules of the Tipping Point -- The Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context -- offer a way of making sense of epidemics. They provide us with direction for how to go about reaching a Tipping Point."

"The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with."

"The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of the bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference."

"The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. 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."

"The velocity of a stone released from David?s sling was the equivalent of a 45-calibar handgun."

"The very thing that made the giant so intimidating was the source of his greatest weakness."

"The values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are."

"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world."

"There are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world."

"There is more going on beneath the surface than we think, and more going on in little, finite moments of time than we would guess."

"There are exceptional people out there who are capable of starting epidemics. All you have to do is find them."

"There is a simple way to package information that, under the right circumstances, can make it irresistible. All you have to do is find it."

"There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis."

"They banded together. They learned the strength of their own faith."

"They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? Mary got a quarter, Friedman says. There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket. ... and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professionals."

"There will be statues of Bill Gates across the Third World. There's a reasonable shot that - because of his money - we will cure malaria."

"These are things that we live with in our society that are puzzling. It's puzzling when you have a little outbreak of school shootings?all these little indices of mass behavior that defy normal explanation."

"Those with health insurance are over-insured and their behavior is distorted by moral hazard. Those without health insurance use their own money to make decisions based on an assessment of their needs. The insured are wasteful. The uninsured are prudent. So what's the solution? Make the insured a little more like the uninsured."

"They had an accurate assessment of where true power really lies."

"To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success ? the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history ? with a society that provides opportunities for all."

"To be someone's best friend requires a minimum investment of time. More than that, though, it takes emotional energy. Caring about someone deeply is exhausting."

"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."

"Understanding the true nature of instinctive decision making requires us to be forgiving of those people trapped in circumstances where good judgment is imperiled."

"We cannot rationally describe the kind of person we will fall in love with: that's why we go on dates to test our theories about who attracts us."

"We are not helpless in the face of our first impressions. They may bubble up from the unconscious - from behind a locked door inside of our brain - but just because something is outside of awareness doesn't mean it's outside of control."

"We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all."

"We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail."

"We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating. They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen."

"We need to look at the subtle, the hidden, and the unspoken."

"We vary greatly in the natural advantages that we've been given. The world's not fair."

"We overlook just how large a role we all play--and by 'we' I mean society--in determining who makes it and who doesn't."

"What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?"

"Western communication has what linguists call a transmitter orientation--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. ...within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said."

"What must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus."

"What happens when two people talk? That is really the basic question here, because, that's the basic context in which all persuasion takes place."

"When I saw the Kouros for the first time, he said, I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work."

"When we become expert in something, our tastes grow more esoteric and complex."

"When we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success--then ... We have a way to successes out of the unsuccessful."

"When you remove time, de Becker says, you are subject to the lowest-quality intuitive reaction."

"Working really hard is what successful people do, and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty."

"Words belong to the person who wrote them"

"Whenever we have something that we are good at--something we care about--that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions."

"Why are manhole covers around? If you don't know the answer to the questions, you're not smart enough to work at Microsoft"

"You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face."

"You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first."

"You don't start at the top if you want to find the story. You start in the middle, because it's the people in the middle who do the actual work in the world."

"Your obstacles and moments of weakness are your greatest opportunity."

"You don't manage a social wrong. You should be ending it."

"You need to have the ability to gracefully navigate the world."