“Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.”
Source: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
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Malcolm Gladwell 70
journalist and science writer 1963Related quotes

“Silence is a source of great strength.”

Examples of self-translation (c. 2004), Quotes - Zitate - Citations - Citazioni

(Hudson Taylor’s Choice Sayings: A Compilation from His Writings and Addresses. London: China Inland Mission, n.d., 29).
Variant: All God’s giants have been weak men, who did great things for God because they reckoned on His being with them.

“Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back.”
The Reactionary Temptation (2017)
Context: Great leaps forward in history are often, in fact, giant leaps back. The Reformation did initiate brutal sectarian warfare. The French Revolution did degenerate into barbarous tyranny. Communist utopias — allegedly the wave of an Elysian future — turned into murderous nightmares. Modern neoliberalism has, for its part, created a global capitalist machine that is seemingly beyond anyone’s control, fast destroying the planet’s climate, wiping out vast tracts of life on Earth while consigning millions of Americans to economic stagnation and cultural despair.
And at an even deeper level, the more we discover about human evolution, the more illusory certain ideas of progress become.

“A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.”
Source: Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Bk. 2, Pt.. 5, Ch. 2: The Mother, p. 522
The Second Sex (1949)
Context: The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence.