Malcolm Gladwell Quotes
From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.
Gladwell, Malcolm. "The unheard story of David and Goliath." TED, Sept. 2013.
This quotation is very controversial among historians. Beverly was in a sense the first American historian, although he had no formal training. His extolling the military and sharpshooting virtues of his fellows may or may not have been an exaggeration both as to their skill with firearms and their ability as soldiers. There is much evidence that only a minority of the people of Virginia possessed firearms at the time yet Beverly’s image is the one that has come down to us in the romanticized view of early America. Even fellow Virginian, George Washington {613056} complained that his Virginia civilians made poor soldiers compared with “regulars” who had been trained to shoot, and when Virginia militia reported for duty less than one quarter had firearms which were very expensive and not very accurate at the time.
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell CM is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published six books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); and Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019). His first five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
