Top 35 George Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A century is about events. A decade is about people.”

— George Friedman

2. “What is the great fear of the United States? That an Eastern power will build a navy to challenge us. How do you keep them from doing that? Keep them at each other’s throats so they don’t have any money to do this. This is why we fought the First World War, the Second World War, and the Cold War.”

— George Friedman

3. “Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.”

— George Friedman

4. “The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human – community – originates in the inhumanity of war.”

— George Friedman

5. “Germany is the new pig. Germany depends on exports and its markets are drying up. When the Germans start getting 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, which is the real variable, how are they going to handle it?”

— George Friedman

6. “Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.”

— George Friedman

7. “Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.”

— George Friedman

8. “Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire – there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on.”

— George Friedman

9. “Constraint theory defines for you what outcomes are possible and what outcomes are impossible. It also eliminates wishful thinking.”

— George Friedman

10. “What is American strategy first of all? So American strategy is to command the seas, right? The foundation of our power is sea control. Nobody can invade us, but we can invade them.”

— George Friedman

11. “Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.”

— George Friedman

12. “Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.”

— George Friedman

13. “One of the great weaknesses of journalists is they interview people and they think that’s important. They think that they are going to show them their true hand. But more to the point, they’re trapped.”

— George Friedman

14. “When I get asked the question, “Do I want to loan you money?” I want to know, how much do you earn? How much do you owe? What is your net worth? When people talk about countries for some reason they only ask how much did you earn and what’s your debt?”

— George Friedman

15. “Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.”

— George Friedman

16. “This highlights the single most important geopolitical fact in the world: the United States controls all of the oceans. No other power in history has been able to do this. And that control is not only the foundation of America’s security but also the foundation of its.”

— George Friedman

17. “Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century. The United States is just beginning its cultural and historical journey.”

— George Friedman

18. “But every time new powers emerge they have to find their balance. New powers are emerging, old powers are declining. It’s not that process that’s dangerous, it’s the emerging position that’s dangerous.”

— George Friedman

19. “Nations do not become strong because they feel like it but because they must.”

— George Friedman

20. “So as soon as you want something to happen you begin skewing the data to support it. Our stuff is invaluable to decision-makers precisely because we have no ax to grind.”

— George Friedman

21. “And from this story I learned about the geopolitics of taking out one’s salami.”

— George Friedman

22. “Assad’s mother was a terror. He was terrified of her and she kept saying to him, you’re not like your father. That’s interesting, but it’s useless information. It doesn’t tell me anything about how the first and second armored brigades are going to operate.”

— George Friedman

23. “Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do so. My job is to try to dissect the event, place it in context and try to understand what has happened and why. From that, after the rage cools, plans for action can be made. Rage has its place, but actions must be taken with discipline and thought.”

— George Friedman

24. “The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.”

— George Friedman

25. “Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.”

— George Friedman

26. “When you drill down and see the forces that are shaping nations, you can see that the menu from which they choose is limited.”

— George Friedman

27. “If you go through the list of things that are not possible you’re left with a very finite amount of possibilities. The fancy name for this is constraint theory. It’s a nonquantitative model, but it’s a field of mathematics.”

— George Friedman

28. “In some sense, the military is the most modern part of a developing country.”

— George Friedman

29. “A research division develops marketing material for its deal makers. We have no policy position. If you have a policy position you can’t possibly forecast.”

— George Friedman

30. “I’m not a journalist. So I didn’t down and let Assad charm me. I didn’t walk away and say “my god he’s got an Apple computer and he really likes Beyonce so he must be a liberal.””

— George Friedman

31. “The pursuit of universal rights requires more than speeches. It requires power.”

— George Friedman

32. “We should remember what Bismarck said in 1888: “If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” Balkan.”

— George Friedman

33. “The foundation of any empire is not guns, something that Hitler and Stalin never grasped. It is money, and the envy that brings. But more important than money or guns is the technology that represents the future and the culture that speaks of being contemporary. All lasting empires are empires of the mind and soul, empires that cause others to crave to emulate them.”

— George Friedman

34. “The technocrats saw expertise as the only measure of a person.”

— George Friedman

35. “The issue now and during the next decade is access to the center of gravity of the technocracy, the leading universities that not only teach subjects but train you in the social rituals that allow you to belong to the technocracy.”

— George Friedman

36. “America is a country in which the storm is essential to clear the way for the calm. Because Americans, obsessed with the present and future, have difficulty remembering the past, they will all believe that there has never been a time as uncivil and tense as this one.”

— George Friedman

37. “The selection process at the best schools is presently designed not to find the best minds but rather to find minds already shaped to the culture and ideology the universities regard as being able to benefit from their education.”

— George Friedman

38. “Expansion in the mission of the federal government has created a belief in its effective power. Its ineffectiveness is therefore seen not as a systemic failure but as the result of a deliberate failure designed to benefit the powerful and harm the many.”

— George Friedman