Thomas L. Friedman Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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 L. Friedman
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

Thomas L. Friedman
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
As for America, we've thrived in recent decades with a credit-consumption-led economy, whereby we maintained a middle class by using more steroids (easy credit, subprime mortgages and construction work) and less muscle-building (education, skill-building and innovation).

Thomas L. Friedman
I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool's errand.

Thomas L. Friedman
Of Tom Friedman:
He won two Pulitzer prizes. He won for balanced and informed coverage. You may have noticed that it was announced on April Fools' Day, which was not by accident. For years the guy has been covering up for Israel, falsifying facts. When the Israeli press comes out with headlines saying "Arafat Calls for Negotiations, Peres Refuses", as they did in December of 1986, Tom Friedman will choose that occasion to write one of his many articles saying that Peace Now is losing credibility because there is no counterpart in the Arab World.

Thomas L. Friedman
I was speaking out in Minnesota — my hometown, in fact — and a guy stood up in the audience, said, "Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you'd oppose?" I said, "No, absolutely not." I said, "You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn't even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade."

Thomas L. Friedman
Now we've entered Globalization 3.0, and it is shrinking the world from size small to a size tiny.

Thomas L. Friedman
Israel should really reflect on what's going on in Egypt. It does not want to be the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process.

Thomas L. Friedman
The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels.

Thomas L. Friedman
Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.

Thomas L. Friedman
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we'll look back at the first decade of the 21st century—when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all—and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we'd crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

Thomas L. Friedman
Am I a bad person if I hope that when Norquist slips in that bathtub and has to call 911, no one answers?

Thomas L. Friedman
Reading Europe's press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush's formulation that an "axis of evil" threatens world peace. There's only one small problem. President Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and the Europeans think it's Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice.

Thomas L. Friedman
In an age when technology is integrating us more tightly together and delivering tremendous flows of innovation, knowledge, connectivity and commerce, the future belongs to those who build webs not walls, who can integrate not separate, to get the most out of these flows.

Thomas L. Friedman
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
Sooner or later, Mr. Bush argued, sanctions would force Mr. Hussein's generals to bring him down, and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.

Thomas L. Friedman
It's the story of our time: the pace of change in technology, globalization and climate have started to outrun the ability of our political systems to build the social, educational, community, workplace and political innovations needed for some citizens to keep up.

Thomas L. Friedman
The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. […] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces.

Thomas L. Friedman
You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept. The concept I'd argue for is "neoliberalism." More Americans today are natural neolibs, than neocons. Neoliberals believe in a muscular foreign policy and a credible defense budget, but also a prudent fiscal policy that balances taxes, deficit reduction and government services.

Thomas L. Friedman
The next six months in Iraq — which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there — are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.

Thomas L. Friedman
The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

Thomas L. Friedman
Remember, in China when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.

Thomas L. Friedman
The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.

Thomas L. Friedman
No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's

Thomas L. Friedman
We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!" That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

Thomas L. Friedman
Hamas devoted all its resources to digging tunnels to attack Israelis from Gaza rather than turning Gaza into Singapore, making a laughingstock of Israeli peace advocates.

Thomas L. Friedman
We need to send the message that anyone who orders suicide bombings against Americans, or protects those who do, commits suicide himself. And U.S. marines will search every cave in Afghanistan to make that principle stick. You order, you die — absolutely, positively, you die.

Thomas L. Friedman
Iran is a great civilization. It could dominate the region with the dynamism of its business class, universities, science and arts. But Iran's ayatollahs don't trust their soft power. They prefer instead to go rogue, to look for dignity in all the wrong places.

Thomas L. Friedman
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 L. Friedman