Thomas Friedman Quotes

#1. It is depressing but not shocking to witness the liberal intelligentsia embrace Ari Shavit so enthusiastically. Shavit is someone who is as consistently wrong as Thomas Friedman on major issues, and at least as much a courtier of power.

Max Blumenthal

#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. 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

#4. 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

#5. When you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn't four percent, it's 100 percent.

Thomas Friedman

#6. 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

#7. The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [ ... ] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.

Thomas Friedman

#8. French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

Thomas L. Friedman

#9. Tom Friedman says China is so awesome they make kosher pigs.

Jonah Goldberg

#10. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.

Thomas Friedman

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. It requires a public awakening, establishment of political will, resetting of priorities, sacrifice for the future, and an alliance of governments, businesses, and citizens.

Thomas L. Friedman

#14. Capitalism makes people unequally rich. Communism makes people equally poor.

Thomas Friedman

#15. Every golf course should have its carbon rating on the scorecard, alongside its Course Rating, Slope, par and yardage.

Thomas Friedman

#16. Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home.

Thomas Friedman

#17. We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that.

Thomas Friedman

#18. 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

#19. Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. Wherever I go I meet innovators of wind power equipment, solar energy operators.

Thomas Friedman

#20. You'll know the green revolution has been won when the word 'green' disappears.

Thomas Friedman

#21. If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

Thomas Friedman

#22. 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

#23. The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people-men and women-rather than drill an oil well.

Thomas L. Friedman

#24. But there is another statistic, much harder to measure, that I think is even more important and revealing: Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?

Thomas L. Friedman

#25. So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist ... If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.

Thomas L. Friedman

#26. Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.

Thomas L. Friedman

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. It was like working in a dark cave with the aid of a single candle. Just when you thought you had spotted the white light of Truth, you would chase it, only to discover that it was someone else, also holding a candle, also looking for the light. A

Thomas L. Friedman

#32. Never before in the history of the planet have so many people, on their own, had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people.

Thomas Friedman

#33. Desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world

Thomas Friedman

#34. today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations.

Thomas L. Friedman

#35. If you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you.

Thomas Friedman

#36. 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

#37. Today more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without referring to the others, and you cannot explain the whole without reference to them all.

Thomas L. Friedman

#38. I'm from Minnesota. I'm optimistic. I mean, that's just who I am.

Thomas Friedman

#39. Indeed, as the world becomes more interdependent and complex, it becomes more vital than ever to widen your aperture and to synthesize more perspectives. My

Thomas L. Friedman

#40. Capitalism and political systems - like companies - must constantly evolve to stay vital.

Thomas Friedman

#41. 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

#42. Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.

Thomas L. Friedman

#43. How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself.

Thomas L. Friedman

#44. 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

#45. Companies that were paying attention understood they were witnessing the birth of the "self-directed consumer", because the internet and all the other tools for the flat world had created a means for every consumer to customize exactly the price, experience, and service he or she wanted.

Thomas L. Friedman

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. To learn how to learn, you have to love learning - or you have to at least enjoy it - because so much learning is about being motivated to teach yourself.

Thomas L. Friedman

#50. No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's

Thomas L. Friedman

#51. We have grown addicted to our high salaries, and now we are really going to have to earn them, the CEO said.

Thomas L. Friedman

#52. No, most of our political elite has not realized that the world is flat.

Thomas Friedman

#53. When I asked the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, "Is God in cyberspace?" he joked at first that God must be in cyberspace because every time he is in the London subway, "I hear people saying into their cell phones, 'Oh God, why doesn't this work!'" Here

Thomas L. Friedman

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.

Thomas Friedman

#58. 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

#59. At its best, the Internet can educate more people faster than any media tool we've ever had. At its worst, it can make people dumber than any media tool we've ever had.

Thomas L. Friedman

#60. You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept.

Thomas Friedman

#61. When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports colosseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently.

Thomas L. Friedman

#62. 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

#63. One is that you should never take no for an answer. There is always some way to make a sale if you have confidence in your merchandise. Just because a customer says no doesn't mean he isn't buying. You just have to sift your way through all the rhetoric and get to the heart of the deal. The

Thomas L. Friedman

#64. 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

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

Thomas Friedman

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

#71. It is so easy to demonize free-market and the freedom to outsource and offshore because it is so much easier to see people being laid off in big bunches, which makes headlines, than to see them being hired in fives and tens by small and medium-sized companies, which rarely makes news.

Thomas L. Friedman

#72. One of the strengths of Labor Zionism had always been its strong pragmatic outlook, its philosophy that a new reality can be built only by careful planning and then constructing things brick by brick, acre after acre. It

Thomas L. Friedman

#73. What every employer is looking for is not someone who can do the job, but someone who can reinvent the job.

Thomas Friedman

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. Rabbi Marx pointed out to me that there is a verse in Isaiah that says, "You are my witness. I am the Lord,

Thomas L. Friedman

#77. 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

#78. The principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.

Thomas L. Friedman

#79. Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger.

Thomas Friedman

#80. Men grant and withdraw their love according to their whims, but fear is a hand that rests on their shoulders in a way they can never shake.

Thomas L. Friedman

#81. 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

#82. Presidents grow up in the White House. The times shape the man.

Thomas Friedman

#83. 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

#84. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language.

Thomas Friedman

#85. 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

#86. In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem.

Thomas L. Friedman

#87. I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college and another who is in the 11th grade of high school.

Thomas Friedman

#88. I am hardly a technophobe. But we will get the best of these technologies only if we don't let them distract us from making these deep human connections, addressing these deep human longings, and inspiring these deep human energies.

Thomas L. Friedman

#89. 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

#90. With so many generous friends and family members from so many places for so many years, how could I not still be an optimist? Thomas

Thomas L. Friedman

#91. Change your leaders, not your light bulbs.

Thomas Friedman

#92. Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

Thomas Friedman

#93. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist.

Thomas Friedman

#94. 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

#95. Our kids are going to be so angry with us one day. We've charged their future on our Visa cards.

Thomas Friedman

#96. Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.

Noam Chomsky

#97. 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

#98. We go to school for twelve or more years during our childhoods and early adulthoods, and then we're done. But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.

Thomas L. Friedman

#99. Development is a voluntary process. You need a positive decision to make the right steps, but it starts with introspection.

Thomas L. Friedman

#100. 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