Top 100 Thomas Friedman Quotes
#1. What we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues.
Thomas Friedman
#2. When you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn't four percent, it's 100 percent.
Thomas Friedman
#3. The country that owns green, that dominates that industry, is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, competitive companies, healthy population and, most of all, global respect.
Thomas Friedman
#4. The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [ ... ] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.
Thomas Friedman
#5. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.
Thomas Friedman
#6. My mom enlisted in the U.S. Navy in World War II, and my parents actually bought our home thanks to the loan she got through the GI Bill.
Thomas Friedman
#7. The more Israel sinks into the West Bank, the more it is delegitimized and isolated, the more the world focuses on Israel's colonialism rather than Iran's nuclear enrichment, the more people call for a single democratic state in all of historic Palestine.
Thomas Friedman
#8. Capitalism makes people unequally rich. Communism makes people equally poor.
Thomas Friedman
#9. Every golf course should have its carbon rating on the scorecard, alongside its Course Rating, Slope, par and yardage.
Thomas Friedman
#10. Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home.
Thomas Friedman
#11. We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that.
Thomas Friedman
#12. Entrepreneurs don't write a 100-page business plan and execute it one time; they're always experimenting and adapting based on what they learn.
Thomas Friedman
#13. Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. Wherever I go I meet innovators of wind power equipment, solar energy operators.
Thomas Friedman
#14. You'll know the green revolution has been won when the word 'green' disappears.
Thomas Friedman
#15. If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.
Thomas Friedman
#16. American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes.
Thomas Friedman
#17. Once people get a taste for whatever you want to call it - economic independence, a better lifestyle, and a better life for their children - they grab on to that and don't want to give it up.
Thomas Friedman
#18. I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.
Thomas Friedman
#19. Golf has an ambivalent relationship with the environment. On one hand, it's a great preserver of open spaces. Golf doesn't pave the world - it helps to green the world. But the downside is, it uses a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water.
Thomas Friedman
#20. I love America. I think it's the best country in the world. But I also think we're not tending to our sauce.
Thomas Friedman
#21. Desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world
Thomas Friedman
#22. If you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you.
Thomas Friedman
#23. The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels.
Thomas Friedman
#24. I'm from Minnesota. I'm optimistic. I mean, that's just who I am.
Thomas Friedman
#25. Capitalism and political systems - like companies - must constantly evolve to stay vital.
Thomas Friedman
#26. We're going in the wrong direction and I think the only way to counter that is to bring the story home in really concrete ways to people - in ways that kids can understand and non-scientists can understand.
Thomas Friedman
#27. Being really good at 'learning how to learn,' as President Bill Brody of Johns Hopkins put it, will be an enormous asset in an era of rapid change and innovation, when new jobs will be phased in and old ones phased out faster than ever.
Thomas Friedman
#28. Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay.
Thomas Friedman
#29. Many jobs at Google require math, computing, and coding skills, so if your good grades truly reflect skills in those areas that you can apply, it would be an advantage. But Google has its eyes on much more.
Thomas Friedman
#30. I basically did all the library research for this book on Google, and it not only saved me enormous amounts of time but actually gave me a much richer offering of research in a shorter time.
Thomas Friedman
#31. We say that necessity is the mother of invention, and no country has more of a necessity to develop clean power than China.
Thomas Friedman
#32. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.
Thomas Friedman
#33. I've been a critic of the antiglobalization movement, and they've been a critic of me, but the one thing I respect about the movement is their authentic energy. These are not people who don't care about the world.
Thomas Friedman
#34. You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept.
Thomas Friedman
#35. We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists.
Thomas Friedman
#36. We've given Iraq six months and I don't think things are really working out, so we should probably bring our troops home.
Thomas Friedman
#37. We need better neighbors, neighbors that care about the schools in their neighborhood whether they have kids in them or not, because they know that the health and vitality of that neighborhood depends on it.
Thomas Friedman
#38. Two things are going on at the same time with the flattening of the world: The relentless quest for efficiency is squeezing some of the fat out of life.
Thomas Friedman
#39. The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.
Thomas Friedman
#40. Nature is regulating our climate for free. Mother Nature, she's been doing that for free, for a long, long time. Now do you really want to get in there and do geo-engineering and all this kind of stuff?
Thomas Friedman
#41. Being one of my sources is exhausting. It's not one interview and you're done. I keep going back until I feel like I understand everything.
Thomas Friedman
#42. Saudi hijackers first came into contact with al-Qaeda and went through Terrorism 101 when they signed up for the jihad in Afghanistan.
Thomas Friedman
#43. What every employer is looking for is not someone who can do the job, but someone who can reinvent the job.
Thomas Friedman
#44. When I was growing up, my parents told me, 'Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' I tell my daughters, 'Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.'
Thomas Friedman
#45. I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.
Thomas Friedman
#46. There's nothing like living a little close to the edge that gets you motivated to ensure that you get the credentials you need to succeed.
Thomas Friedman
#47. Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger.
Thomas Friedman
#48. Presidents grow up in the White House. The times shape the man.
Thomas Friedman
#49. Benjamin Netanyahu understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.
Thomas Friedman
#50. Sometimes, when my wife and I were going out to dinner, I would take my laptop with me and work in the car, so as to take advantage of the half hour going and coming.
Thomas Friedman
#51. I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college and another who is in the 11th grade of high school.
Thomas Friedman
#52. I think we have lost our groove as a country. One of the reasons was the attack on 9/11. We got knocked off our game. From a country that always exported hope we went into the business of exporting fear.
Thomas Friedman
#53. Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.
Thomas Friedman
#54. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.
Thomas Friedman
#55. If we don't have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages ... change.
Thomas Friedman
#56. I would say that in 2000, we understand as much about how today's system of globalization is going to work as we understood about how the Cold War system was going to work in 1946.
Thomas Friedman
#57. No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.
Thomas Friedman
#58. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.
Thomas Friedman
#59. Remember, in China when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.
Thomas Friedman
#60. Many authors hate to go on grinding book tours. But I've always found it a useful way to be a foreign correspondent in America and take the pulse of the country.
Thomas Friedman
#61. It is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you.
Thomas Friedman
#62. When you go along in life and develop whatever notoriety you do, people begin to relate to you differently, and I'm just always most comfortable with the people I grew up with.
Thomas Friedman
#63. We've gone from thinking the fuels that powered our growth were inexpensive, inexhaustible and benign to understanding they are exhaustible, expensive and toxic. Once you frame the problem that way, people will look at solutions differently.
Thomas Friedman
#64. Hope and optimism aren't just attitudes, they are life strategies.
Thomas Friedman
#65. There is no substitute for face-to-face reporting and research.
Thomas Friedman
#66. I'm a capitalist. I believe in capitalism. But capitalism only works if you have safety nets to deal with people who are naturally left behind and brutalized by it.
Thomas Friedman
#67. Natural gas emits only half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned, but if methane leaks when oil companies extract it from the ground in a sloppy manner - methane is far more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - it can wipe out all the advantages of natural gas over coal.
Thomas Friedman
#68. Lord knows there's a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education.
Thomas Friedman
#69. When I think back on my favorite teachers, I don't remember anymore much of what they taught me, but I sure remember being excited about learning it. What has stayed with me are not the facts they imparted, but the excitement about learning they inspired.
Thomas Friedman
#70. In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.
Thomas Friedman
#71. The Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention argues that no two countries that are both part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they are each part of that supply chain.
Thomas Friedman
#72. Netscape brought the Internet alive with the browser. They made the Internet so that Grandma could use it, and her grandchildren could use it. The second thing that Netscape did was commercialize a set of open transmission protocols so that no company could own the Net.
Thomas Friedman
#73. We need a proper balance between government spending on nursing homes and nursery schools - on the last six months of life and the first six months of life.
Thomas Friedman
#74. Google attracts so much talent, it can afford to look beyond traditional metrics, like G.P.A. For most young people, though, going to college and doing well is still the best way to master the tools needed for many careers.
Thomas Friedman
#75. America still has the right stuff to thrive. We still have the most creative, diverse, innovative culture and open society - in a world where the ability to imagine and generate new ideas with speed and to implement them through global collaboration is the most important competitive advantage.
Thomas Friedman
#76. Your boss doesn't care what you know, because the Google machine knows everything. Your boss cares about what you can do with what you know. That's the only thing your boss will pay for.
Thomas Friedman
#77. John Kennedy led us on a journey to discover the moon. Obama needs to lead us on a journey to rediscover, rebuild and reinvent our own backyard.
Thomas Friedman
#78. A 2011 report produced by Forrester Research estimated that the revenue generated through the sales of smartphone and tablet applications will reach $38 billion annually by 2015. Think about that: An industry that did not exist in 2006 will be generating $38 billion in revenues within a decade ...
Thomas Friedman
#79. Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.
Thomas Friedman
#81. Iraq may still have a decent outcome ... but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.
Thomas Friedman
#82. When it comes to dealing with the world's climate and energy challenges, I have a simple rule: change America, change the world.
Thomas Friedman
#83. If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.
Thomas Friedman
#84. It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world.
Thomas Friedman
#87. You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It's exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.
Thomas Friedman
#88. Supply chains cannot tolerate even 24 hours of disruption. So if you lose your place in the supply chain because of wild behavior you could lose a lot. It would be like pouring cement down one of your oil wells.
Thomas Friedman
#89. I attended public school with the same group of kids from K through 12.
Thomas Friedman
#90. C'mon kids! Wake up and smell the CO2! Take over your administration building, occupy your university president's office, or storm in on the next meeting of your college's board of trustees until they agree to make your school carbon neutral.
Thomas Friedman
#91. A golf course should aspire to generate as much energy as it consumes - golf should be leading the way toward energy net zero.
Thomas Friedman
#92. Only if you give the Palestinians something to lose is there a hope that they will agree to moderate their demands ... I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands.
Thomas Friedman
#93. We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.
Thomas Friedman
#94. There is something more severe than the problem with Thomas Friedman, which can be generalized to represent someone causing action while being completely unaccountable for his words.
Thomas Friedman
#96. I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.
Thomas Friedman
#97. When I wrote 'The World Is Flat,' I said the world is flat. Yeah, we're all connected. Facebook didn't exist; Twitter was a sound; the cloud was in the sky; 4G was a parking place; LinkedIn was a prison; applications were what you sent to college; and Skype, for most people, was a typo.
Thomas Friedman
#100. The merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.
Thomas Friedman
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