Top 45 Thomas Friedman Quotes

I attended public school with the same group of kids from K through 12.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I’ve always enjoyed the communal side of Jewish life.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

McDonald‘s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.

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.

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

Every sport needs its temple, its cathedral.

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.’

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

America needs rebooting.

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.

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.

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.

Basically all the world‘s computer parts come from the same supply chain that runs from Korea, down through coastal China, over to Taiwan, and down to Malaysia.

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

There is no substitute for face-to-face reporting and research.

If the Republican Party continues to take the view that there must be no tax increases, we’re stuck. Capitalism can’t work without safety nets or fiscal prudence, and we need both in a sustainable balance.

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?

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.

By ‘flat’ I did not mean that the world is getting equal. I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before. That’s why an Indian in Bangalore can take care of the office work of American doctors or read the X-rays of German hospitals.

We say that necessity is the mother of invention, and no country has more of a necessity to develop clean power than China.

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.

Al Qaeda is nothing more than a mutant supply chain. They’re playing off the same platform as Wal-Mart and Dell. They’re just not restrained by it. What is al Qaeda? It’s an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.

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.

I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.

If you don’t visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

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.

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

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.

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.

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