They were not really afraid. They were just afraid of being afraid.
I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a sig...
The futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it.
You can’t concentrate on doing anything if you are thinking, What’s gonna happen if it doesn’t go right?
What the Israelites saw, from high on the ridge, was an intimidating giant. In reality, the very thing that gave the giant his size was also the source of his greatest weakness. There is an important...
What are we seeing here? One very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter. Think back to...
We really only trust conscious decision making. But 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 b...
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 enoug...
We have trouble estimating dramatic, exponential change. We cannot conceive that a piece of paper folded over 50 times could reach the sun. There are abrupt limits to the number of cognitive categorie...
Those who are successful at creating social epidemics do not just do what they think is right. They deliberately test their intuitions.
There isn't one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a c...
There are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.
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 reachi...
The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.
The scholars who research happiness suggest that more money stops making people happier at a family income of around seventy-five thousand dollars a year. After that, what economists call diminishing...
The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.
The real me isn't the person I describe, no the real me is the me revealed by my actions.
The contrast between the previous apprehension and the present relief and feeling of security promotes a self-confidence that is the very father and mother of courage.
That is the paradox of the epidemic: that in order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first.
Some pretend to be rich, yet have nothing; others pretend to be poor, yet have great wealth.
