Thomas Friedman Quotes

I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

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.

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.'

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

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

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

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.

In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.

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.

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?

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.

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

At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it - if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can't see anything green during the day? Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.

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.

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.

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.

I've always believed the world would be a better place if more people everywhere have a chance to shape their own future and realize their full potential. I think that is what life is about.

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

Hope and optimism aren't just attitudes, they are life strategies.

No matter what your profession – doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant – if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer.

If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you're not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. That is what I mean when I say "it is a 401(k) world." Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it.

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

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

Remember, the difference between the world frozen over, in an ice ball, and the warming period we're in now is just 6 degrees centigrade. A change of just 1 degree can have a huge effect.

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.

The thing you have to remember is, oil and gas are commodities, and the more we use them the more the price goes up, like any commodity. Solar, wind - they are technologies, so the more you use them, the more the price goes down.

Do you know what my favorite renewable fuel is? An ecosystem for innovation.

When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.

If you want to get an advance machine tool job today, you need to know calculus. We know a lot of people don't, we can't expect everyone to know calculus, what do we do? We created a huge bubble that created a huge number of jobs to build houses and to be in retail. You don't have to have a lot of skills to work in the new Gap store that opened, at the latest Starbucks branch, or to hammer a nail for a new house.

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.

In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny.

Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.

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

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.

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

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

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

I think that competition will exist even if we discover more oil. We're never going to know how much we have, or how long will it last. You are always going to want to have diversity of supply. I think the Middle East will remain a region of competition, of global competition, fighting for a long time.

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

The Arab awakening was like watching elephants fly: something you didn't expect, something you haven't seen before, "Wow, elephants fly."

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.

A vision without resources is an hallucination.

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

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

Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed

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

I'm a radical pro-immigration advocate. I'm not saying we just look at the Muslim world or we just look at China, we just look at India as a source of our talent. But, one thing we know... first or second generation or new immigrants or children of immigrants have started about 40% of the Fortune 500 companies. For me it's always been a really very important issue that I want America to be open to the most energetic and talented people from around the world.

Until we fully understand what turned two brothers who allegedly perpetrated the Boston Marathon bombings into murderers, it is hard to make any policy recommendation other than this: We need to redouble our efforts to make America stronger and healthier so it remains a vibrant counterexample to whatever bigoted ideology may have gripped these young men....And the best place to start is with a carbon tax.

Every sport needs its temple, its cathedral.

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