Top 100 Friedman's Quotes
#2. Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India.
Pankaj Mishra
#3. By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
#4. A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman's famous 'helicopter drop' of money.
Ben Bernanke
#5. If I really believed in Friedman's economic theory, then I'd be quite satisfied to spend the rest of my life with a garden hose shoved down my throat, being filled with custard by representatives of the people of China.
Nigel Lawson
#6. While no inference is intended here, it is worth noting, in connection with Milton Friedman's comment that "Kelso just turned Marx upside down," that it is not necessarily amiss to turn a fellow upside down if that in fact straightens out his thinking.
Louis O. Kelso
#7. There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes.
Joan Robinson
#8. When you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn't four percent, it's 100 percent.
Thomas Friedman
#10. All data leaves a trail. The search for data leaves a trail. The erasure of data leaves a trail. The absence of data, under the right circumstances, can leave the clearest trail of all.
C.S. Friedman
#11. The Federal Reserve the privately owned U.S. central bank definitely caused The Great Depression by contracting the amount of currency in circulation by one third from 1929 to 1933.
Milton Friedman
#12. I don't have to work extra hard, but that's because there are a lot of women in my professional network and I have hired a lot of women as full-time writers and part-time columnists.
Ann Friedman
#13. Tomorrow could not get better if one failed to survive today.
C.S. Friedman
#14. In the music industry, we value large success. I realized that while I would like that, that it's not what my writing is about. And if I start making it about that, it becomes impure.
David Friedman
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. This is called "spiritual lifting." It's not heavy lifting. The governor of Texas should not be confused with Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's a powerful position. The governor of Texas can't do any heavy lifting really. It's not that powerful a position.
Kinky Friedman
#18. Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does.
C.S. Friedman
#19. As to the meaning of "corporate social responsibility," Friedman and I would agree: If a certain action improves the corporation's bottom line, there's no point in labeling it "socially responsible." It's just good business.
Robert Reich
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.
Milton Friedman
#24. It's all very well going around thinking you're a cowboy, until you run into somebody who thinks he's an Indian.
Kinky Friedman
#25. The only currency I value is the coin of the spirit. That's very important in my life.
Kinky Friedman
#26. There's no way to avoid a burden on your freedom. The costs themselves are a burden on your freedom. The restrictions that are necessary in order to get rid of the terrorists are a burden to your freedom. So there's no way in the short run to avoid a restriction on your freedom.
Milton Friedman
#27. Let me tell you the tale of a poet who hanged himself with promises ...
C.S. Friedman
#28. 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
#29. I can spend somebody else's money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else's money on somebody else, I'm not concerned about how much it is, and I'm not concerned about what I get. And that's government. And that's close to 40 percent of our national income.
Milton Friedman
#30. I'm from Minnesota. I'm optimistic. I mean, that's just who I am.
Thomas Friedman
#31. Feminism is what I do with my life, it's how I spend my days, it's my job, it's not just an opinion I have among many other opinions.
Jaclyn Friedman
#32. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.
Milton Friedman
#33. Remember: Y'all is singular. All y'all is plural. All y'all's is plural possessive.
Kinky Friedman
#34. The most important thing about a TV set is to get it back against something and not out in the middle of a room where it's like a somber fellow making electronic judgments on you.
Bruce Jay Friedman
#35. And from this story I learned about the geopolitics of taking out one's salami.
George Friedman
#36. I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.
Milton Friedman
#37. The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next twenty-five or fifty years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.
Milton Friedman
#38. There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.
Milton Friedman
#39. Today's workers need to approach the workplace much like athletes preparing for the Olympics, with one difference. They have to prepare like someone who is training for the Olympics but doesn't know what sport they are going to enter,
Thomas L. Friedman
#40. There's nothing that does so much harm as good intentions.
Milton Friedman
#41. A man does not truly understand his limitations until he has tested them.
C.S. Friedman
#43. Sometimes the decision is placed in your hands and you just have to go with it, right or wrong, according to what you think is best.
C.S. Friedman
#44. No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's
Thomas L. Friedman
#45. The state of our educational system is a disgrace to our country. We have an elementary and secondary school system in which close to half of the youngsters never graduate properly. It's a disgrace that there is more illiteracy today than there was 100 years ago.
Milton Friedman
#46. Look," she told me. "A good kreda is very hard to find. I invested a lot of time and memory in you. I had no intention of giving all that up, just because you were going to be in a bad mood for a decade or two.
C.S. Friedman
#47. These Aussie girls are free to set their own courses in the world, to meander and experiment. Their travels are not bumps along the road - they are life itself. See the world and then come home and decide who you want to be in it, not the other way around, as seems the general trajectory in the U.S.
Rachel Friedman
#48. How did we make the transition from using wood to using coal, from using coal to using oil, from using oil to using natural gas? How in God's name did we make that transition without a Federal Energy Agency?
Milton Friedman
#49. 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
#50. Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different question. He's always the special case. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that and the other thing.
Milton Friedman
#51. There will be a whole new spirit blowing through Texas. There will be a smile on everybody's face and a chill up the spine of every politician.
Kinky Friedman
#52. China's productive system draws upon the other East Asian countries to a great extent. The volume of trade is much larger than the net amount being exported from China. China needs substantial reserves to finance all that.
Milton Friedman
#53. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.
Thomas Friedman
#54. (Mr. Friedman) was always kind of dopey."
"Actually, Bob is very smart. Too smart to be a teacher. It's why he doesn't connect with the stuxents.
Jessica Knoll
#55. You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept.
Thomas Friedman
#56. Neil Young and Barry Friedman had stolen a Buffalo Springfield sign off the steamroller for Barrys house. They put it up. We all looked at it on the wall and a light went off. That's how we came up with the name
Stephen Stills
#57. The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness.
Maurice S. Friedman
#58. If you have the choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There's always time to be humble later, once you've been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong.
Kinky Friedman
#59. I want to tell her that promises are as dangerous as secrets, but by then she's floating out the door. I hear her light footsteps on the stairs, and then the front door slams.
Aimee Friedman
#60. I want my list of works to be lean and mean and everything was urgent and had to be done. Nothing to play the market. My family's had to suffer for that, that I haven't done commercial jobs just to bring home the bacon.
Josh Alan Friedman
#61. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
Milton Friedman
#62. I rarely meddled in the cat's personal affairs and she rarely meddled in mine. Neither of us was foolish enough to attribute human emotions to our pets.
Kinky Friedman
#63. It's a moral problem that the government is making into criminals people, who may be doing something you and I don't approve of, but who are doing something that hurts nobody else.
Milton Friedman
#64. 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
#65. Government spends somebody else's money on somebody else.
Milton Friedman
#66. I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant (Gerald Tarrant).
C.S. Friedman
#67. All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?
C.S. Friedman
#68. There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979
Kinky Friedman
#69. You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport. To find people whose day's toil has not been lightened by mechanical invention, you must go to the non-capitalist world.
Milton Friedman
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. It's exciting to fit somewhere when I have felt out of place everywhere for so long.
Rachel Friedman
#73. Big Linux deployments have reached the point where it's become a real problem for administrators that they don't have nice tools to manage their servers and desktops.
Nat Friedman
#74. 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
#75. I have a better head of hair than Rick Perry; it's just not in a place I can show you.
Kinky Friedman
#76. It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian ... Or becoming a Negro for four years.
Josh Alan Friedman
#77. It's an interesting line that I walk. The AIDS crisis has done a lot for my songs and made them proliferate, and my songs have contributed a lot to that cause as well.
David Friedman
#78. I think a major reason why intellectuals tend to move towards collectivism is that the collectivist answer is a simple one. If there's something wrong, pass a law and do something about it.
Milton Friedman
#79. Gabriel Wilensky's book is an excellent introduction into the history of antisemitism in Europe. His words will rightly unsettle those who have yet to come to grips with Christianity's role in shaping European attitudes and policies towards Jews into the 20th century.
Jonathan Friedman
#80. It's a wonderful way to get at who someone is through their own love of music and going right at their subconsciousness if you will. You don't play girl singers for girl singers. You know, there's certain things. You do play Ellington for Bobby McFerrin.
Carol Friedman
#81. Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger.
Thomas Friedman
#82. There's this magical sense of possibility that stretches like a bridge between June and August. A sense that anything can happen.
Aimee Friedman
#83. I write and direct the Duke University Children's Hospital Benefit every year.
David Friedman
#84. In other words, he explained, unless we bear witness to God's presence by our own good deeds, He is not present.
Thomas L. Friedman
#85. In terms of companies, they must stand for something bigger. They must be dedicated to something larger than financial results. I reject the Milton Friedman belief that a company's sole responsibility is to the shareholders.
Srikumar Rao
#86. The antidote to envy is one's own work. Always one's own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.
Bonnie Friedman
#87. OS X is sweet: it's simple and intuitive, and I think GNOME shares a lot of values with it.
Nat Friedman
#88. There is no such thing as redemption, my friend. There is right, there is wrong, and there are a million shades of color between the two. Once you've done wrong, it is always with you. You just have to try and be better.
C.S. Friedman
#89. A Code of Honor: Never approach a friend's girlfriend or wife with mischief as your goal. There are just too many women in the world to justify that sort of dishonorable behavior. Unless she's really attractive.
Bruce Jay Friedman
#90. There's no doubt in my mind that Ronald Reagan was by far the greatest. Because he had real principles and he stuck by them. He made clear what he was going to do, and he did it. He didn't back down.
Milton Friedman
#91. The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense ... and then failed, miserably, in every regard.
C.S. Friedman
#92. Adam Smith's key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
Milton Friedman
#93. It's as difficult to describe the sea as it is a piece of music.
Rachel Friedman
#94. Stories hang from the trees, hive under the coffee table, gather like glass on the corners of the road. To pick them up one needs simply to focus one's eye and keep a steady hand. Writing focuses the eye; writing develops the steadiness of one's hand.
Bonnie Friedman
#95. The system is not perfect. Until it's perfect, let's do away with the death penalty.
Kinky Friedman
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time.
Jerome Isaac Friedman
#99. We're all worm bait waiting to happen. It's what you do while you wait that matters.
Kinky Friedman
#100. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.
Thomas Friedman
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