Outlier Quotes

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that's the most interesting: the part that doesn't go according to what you expected.

The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization.

From Stanford to Harvard, MIT to UC Berkeley, a new generation is leaving elite schools in droves, convinced that the future belongs not to the credentialed but to the self-taught. Now, the college dropout is no longer an outlier. In the right circles, it has become a kind of anti-credential—an archetype of prestige in its own right.

Someone once described me as a maverick and that's what I would say. I'm a maverick not by choice but by conviction.

I was always an odd girl; I managed to alienate a lot of people. I felt like a square peg in a round hole in the music industry and created a lot of neurosis for myself.

I was the only kid reading guitar magazines at the back of the classroom.

In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it.

You have to be a crazy guy and a little eccentric to be very successful.

I am the black sheep of my family. They are all super talented and intelligent and got proper jobs. Most of my family is in medicine, actually. They are all too clever to be doing what I do.

The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.

The bottom line is I'm a slow zombie guy - I'm always a slow zombie guy but I also know I'm in the minority.

I was always regarded as being better than ninety percent of the kids in school, but I was also something of a loner.

When you get into statistical analysis, you don't really expect to achieve fame. Or to become an Internet meme. Or be parodied by 'The Onion' - or be the subject of a cartoon in 'The New Yorker.' I guess I'm kind of an outlier there.

No one in my family is musical, including extended family. I am like the black sheep.

Of course, the entire effort is to put myself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. A hundred are killed In the outer suburbs. Well, well, I carry on.

The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that is most interesting.

There is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement.

I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws.

It's disheartening that people think that Donald Sterling is the outlier and that he's the exception and not the rule.

If just one of [those people] experiences life as a crazy adventure--and I mean that he, or she, experiences this every single day... Then he or she is a joker in a pack of cards.

I think the people get that I'm just kind of an anomaly in a certain way.

To be successful, one has to be one of three bees: the queen bee, the hardest working bee, or the bee that does not fit in.

The exception tests the rule.

Anomaly is when you don't fit the expected norm. Like "wait what is this?! It doesn't belong here." Its what the system never planned for but now has to adapt to. Its Neo in The Matrix.