The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference Quotes
"It takes only the smallest of changes to shatter an epidemic’s equilibrium."
"Epidemics are a function of the people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating."
"In a given process or system some people matter more than others."
"The hard part of communication is often figuring out how to make sure a message doesn’t go in one ear and out the other."
"Human beings are a lot more sensitive to their environment than they may seem."
"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."
"Word of mouth is—even in this age of mass communications and multimillion dollar advertising campaigns—still the most important form of human communication."
"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."
"Mavens are people who have information on a lot of different products or prices or places."
"The power of positive thinking will overcome so many things."
"When people watch the news, they don’t intentionally filter biases out, or feel they have to argue against the expression of the newscaster."
"The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely—was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their own pockets."
"Little things can, apparently, make as much of a difference as big things."
"The subtle circumstances surrounding how we say things may matter more than what we say."
"Persuasion often works in ways that we do not appreciate."
"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."
"Interactional synchrony. Their conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension."
"Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground."
"We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other."
"If I can make you smile, I can make you happy. If I can make you frown, I can make you sad."
"There are carriers, people who are very expressive, and there are people who are especially susceptible."
"In the advertising world, direct marketers are the real students of stickiness."
"The line between hostility and acceptance, in other words, between an epidemic that tips and one that does not, is sometimes a lot narrower than it seems."
"Unable to pay the fare to get into the system, we had to enter through a slam gate being held open by a scruffy looking character with his hand out."
"This was New York City in the 1980s, a city in the grip of one of the worst crime epidemics in its history."
"To say someone is a criminal is to say that he or she is evil or violent or dangerous or dishonest or unstable or any combination of any of those things."
"But for some reason tens of thousands of those people suddenly stopped committing crimes."
"Epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places in which they occur."
"During the 1990s violent crime declined across the United States for a number of fairly straightforward reasons."
"Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling."
"We knew the kids would be working on one of the dirty trains, and what we would do is wait for them to finish their mural."
"Suddenly it wasn’t hard to convince police officers that tackling fare beating made sense."
"Minor, seemingly insignificant quality of life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crime."
"The Power of Context is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context."
"Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context."
"The Rule of 150 suggests that the size of a group is another one of those subtle contextual factors that can make a big difference."
"In order to create one contagious movement, you often have to create many small movements first."
"If anyone wants to start an epidemic, then—whether it is of shoes or behavior or a piece of software—he or she has to somehow employ Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in this very way."
"The message here—new seeds—was highly contagious and powerfully sticky."
"The attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible."
"Smokers aren’t smokers because they underestimate the risks of smoking. They smoke even though they overestimate the risk of smoking."
"The process is essentially similar to that whereby a person uses a word in a spoken language."
"The Band Aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost."