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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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."

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

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

A vision without resources is an hallucination.

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

Every sport needs its temple, its cathedral.

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

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

McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.

We have to fight the terrorists as if there were no rules and preserve our open society as if there were no terrorists.

Change your leaders, not your light bulbs.

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.

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.

We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.

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

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

Most jobs are outsourced to the past, they aren't outsourced to India or Mexico or Pakistan or anywhere else.

Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.

Yes, the world is now flat for publishing as well.

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.

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

A generation ago [the Democratic Party] stood for progressive change. Now they defend every federal program as if each were sacred. They have become the most conservative force in American politics.

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.

What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.

A golf course should aspire to generate as much energy as it consumes - golf should be leading the way toward energy net zero.

If e-mail had been around before the telephone was invented, people would have said, 'Hey, forget e-mail! With this new telephone invention I can actually talk to people!'.

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

It is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you.

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