Top 140 Thomas L. Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Capitalism makes people unequally rich. Communism makes people equally poor.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

3. “Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

4. “A vision without resources is an hallucination.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

5. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

7. “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

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

9. “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

10. “We have to be the best global citizens we can be.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

12. “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

13. “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

14. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

15. “Never before in the history of the planet have so many people, on their own, had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

17. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

20. “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.’”

— Thomas L. Friedman

21. “The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

22. “Change your leaders, not your light bulbs.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

23. “I’m a capitalist. I believe in capitalism. But capitalism only works if you have safety nets to deal with people who are naturally left behind and brutalized by it.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

24. “When you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn’t four percent, it’s 100 percent.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

25. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

26. “Desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

27. “Once people get a taste for whatever you want to call it – economic independence, a better lifestyle, and a better life for their children – they grab on to that and don’t want to give it up.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

28. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

29. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

30. “In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

31. “You’ll know the green revolution has been won when the word ‘green’ disappears.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

32. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

33. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

34. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

36. “American young people have got to understand from an early age that the world pays off on results, not on effort. Not everyone should win a prize no matter where he or she finishes.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

37. “Communism was a great system for making people equally poor – in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

38. “The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

40. “GE’s lab is like a mini United Nations. Every engineering team looks like one of those multiethnic Benetton ads. But this was not affirmative action at work; it was a brutal meritocracy. When you are competing in the global technology Olympics every day, you have to recruit the best talent from anywhere you can find it.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

41. “What we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

42. “To learn how to learn, you have to love learning – or you have to at least enjoy it – because so much learning is about being motivated to teach yourself.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

43. “A Nobel Prize winner was asked how he became a scientist. He said that every day after school, his mother would ask him not what he learned but whether he asked a good question today. That, he said, was how he became a scientist.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

45. “Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

48. “Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

50. “The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.”

— Thomas L. Friedman