Top 64 George Friedman Quotes
#1. The pursuit of universal rights requires more than speeches. It requires power.
George Friedman
#2. It is interesting to note that Copernicus was German/Polish, Luther was German, and Gutenberg was German.
George Friedman
#3. Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.
George Friedman
#4. We should remember what Bismarck said in 1888: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." Balkan
George Friedman
#5. The most efficient way to use military power is to disrupt emerging powers before they can become even marginally threatening.
George Friedman
#6. When you drill down and see the forces that are shaping nations, you can see that the menu from which they choose is limited.
George Friedman
#7. Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.
George Friedman
#8. And from this story I learned about the geopolitics of taking out one's salami.
George Friedman
#9. There are endless unknowns, and no forecast of a century can be either complete or utterly correct.
George Friedman
#10. Nations do not become strong because they feel like it but because they must.
George Friedman
#11. But every time new powers emerge they have to find their balance. New powers are emerging, old powers are declining. It's not that process that's dangerous, it's the emerging position that's dangerous.
George Friedman
#12. Europe is in an economic crisis. Germany is the wealthiest country in Europe and it benefits the most from Europe. However, the German public doesn't want to pay for what they see as Greek indolence and corruption.
George Friedman
#13. Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.
George Friedman
#14. In Geo-Politics, a nation has no permanent allies or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
George Friedman
#15. When I get asked the question, "Do I want to loan you money?" I want to know, how much do you earn? How much do you owe? What is your net worth? When people talk about countries for some reason they only ask how much did you earn and what's your debt?
George Friedman
#16. But wishes don't make policy. Policy is made by reality, and the reality of what has been created, whether intentionally or not, can't be abandoned without breathtakingly severe consequences.
George Friedman
#17. The American people must mature. We are an adolescent lot, expecting solutions to insoluble problems and perfection in our leaders.
George Friedman
#18. The Mediterranean was, before the northern European industrial revolution, one of the wealthiest regions in the world. Divisions between Muslim North Africa and Christian southern Europe were contained, if not always peacefully. The
George Friedman
#19. It mattered a great deal who occupied your country. The
George Friedman
#20. As the global powers diverge and Europe is caught in the middle, the lack of hard power will matter more and more. Being rich and weak is a dangerous combination. Europe therefore lives in a world of wolves.
George Friedman
#21. Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.
George Friedman
#22. In some sense, the military is the most modern part of a developing country.
George Friedman
#23. Horthy was no more of an anti-Semite than good manners required, and this was not something he may have wanted himself, but his duty was to preserve an independent Hungary, and if putting Jews into labor battalions was what was needed, he was going to do what was needed. For
George Friedman
#24. Presidents and other politicians manage the appearance of things, largely by manipulating the air and hope.
George Friedman
#25. A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.
George Friedman
#26. In the fog of history and myth, the American role in championing and underwriting European integration is frequently forgotten, along with the resistance of the Europeans.
George Friedman
#27. The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.
George Friedman
#28. A research division develops marketing material for its deal makers. We have no policy position. If you have a policy position you can't possibly forecast.
George Friedman
#29. Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire - there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on.
George Friedman
#31. At the end of the war American and Soviet troops massed throughout most of the European peninsula, with Americans also in Britain and the British in Europe. The peninsula was occupied, shattered and exhausted, no longer the arbiter of its own fate.
George Friedman
#32. As the Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won't have an appetite for a third war with Russia. The United States, however, will back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support.
George Friedman
#33. One of the great weaknesses of journalists is they interview people and they think that's important. They think that they are going to show them their true hand. But more to the point, they're trapped.
George Friedman
#34. The Fifth Commandment of the Decalogue demands that one honor one's mother and father. That is not about calling home. It is about this: Their God is your God, their friends are your friends, their debts are your debts, their enemies are your enemies and their fate is your fate.
George Friedman
#35. The nation provided a human with the things that are most human - language and a past that stretched back before his birth.
George Friedman
#36. ... common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong.
George Friedman
#37. Germany is the new pig. Germany depends on exports and its markets are drying up. When the Germans start getting 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, which is the real variable, how are they going to handle it?
George Friedman
#38. What is the great fear of the United States? That an Eastern power will build a navy to challenge us. How do you keep them from doing that? Keep them at each other's throats so they don't have any money to do this. This is why we fought the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.
George Friedman
#40. The idea that the president has the power to craft a new strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of reality crafted by those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us.
George Friedman
#41. Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.
George Friedman
#42. This highlights the single most important geopolitical fact in the world: the United States controls all of the oceans. No other power in history has been able to do this. And that control is not only the foundation of America's security but also the foundation of its
George Friedman
#43. The European peninsula was occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, its sovereignty compromised. Over the next decades its empire would disintegrate and its global power disappear.
George Friedman
#44. In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. It
George Friedman
#45. Great powers can tend to be casual because the situation is not existential. This increases the cost of doing what is necessary.
George Friedman
#46. Maintaining the balance of power should be as fundamental to American foreign policy as the Bill of Rights is to domestic policy.
George Friedman
#47. It is good, as I have said, to be neither victim nor victimizer. Unfortunately, it is not possible. What
George Friedman
#48. Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.
George Friedman
#49. Success will require the studied lack of sophistication of a Ronald Reagan and the casual dishonesty of an FDR. The president must appear to be not very bright yet be able to lie convincingly.
George Friedman
#50. The worst president is closer by nature to the best then either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.
George Friedman
#51. since the EU was created, there have been more wars in Europe than between 1945 and 1992. Many
George Friedman
#52. In the end, the problem of Europe is the same problem that haunted its greatest moment, the Enlightenment. It is the Faustian spirit, the desire to possess everything even at the cost of their souls.
George Friedman
#53. If the cost of naming the enemy is diplomatically or politically unacceptable, then the war is not likely to go well.
George Friedman
#54. There has never been a century that has not had a systemic war - a systemic war, meaning when the entire system convulses. From the Seven Years' War in Europe to the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century to the World Wars, every century has one.
George Friedman
#55. Terrorism is an act of violence whose primary purpose is to create fear and, through that, a political result.
George Friedman
#56. But smuggling people is a referral business, and you don't get good references by robbing and killing your charges. You may get away with it once or twice, but then business dries up.
George Friedman
#57. Hitler believed nothing, so he was free to believe in anything.
George Friedman
#58. The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them.
George Friedman
#59. In the course of the century, so many individual decisions are made that no single one of them is ever critical. Each decision is lost in the torrent of judgments that make up a century.
George Friedman
#60. Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.
George Friedman
#62. Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.
George Friedman
#63. Success looks like you sitting here pretty confident that an armed brigade isn't going to come pouring in here and blow your head off. Which I don't think is your major concern. Therefore, the United States' foreign policy is successful.
George Friedman
#64. Long-term solutions are more attractive and cause much less controversy than short-term solutions, which will affect people who are still alive and voting.
George Friedman
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