Top 140 Thomas L. Friedman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I’m from Minnesota. I’m optimistic. I mean, that’s just who I am.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

53. “What comes from the heart enters the heart.” What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

54. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

55. “Benjamin Netanyahu understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

56. “We’re going in the wrong direction and I think the only way to counter that is to bring the story home in really concrete ways to people – in ways that kids can understand and non-scientists can understand.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

57. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

59. “The three largest forces on the planet – technology, globalization, and climate change – are all accelerating at once.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

60. “America needs rebooting.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

62. “Almost all the students who make it to Caltech, one of the best scientific universities in the world, come from public schools. So it can be done.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

64. “Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance – or soon, even language.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

66. “Just because we can’t sell shares in nature doesn’t mean it has no value.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

67. “Saudi hijackers first came into contact with al-Qaeda and went through Terrorism 101 when they signed up for the jihad in Afghanistan.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

69. “I love America. I think it’s the best country in the world. But I also think we’re not tending to our sauce.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

70. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

71. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

74. “Every sport needs its temple, its cathedral.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

75. “Every golf course should have its carbon rating on the scorecard, alongside its Course Rating, Slope, par and yardage.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

76. “There is something more severe than the problem with Thomas Friedman, which can be generalized to represent someone causing action while being completely unaccountable for his words.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

77. “There’s a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It’s a difference in degree that’s so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

78. “That is why, I explained to Bojia, as a columnist, “I am either in the heating business or the lighting business.” Every column or blog has to either turn on a lightbulb in your reader’s head – illuminate an issue in a way that will inspire them to look at it anew – or stoke an emotion in your reader’s heart that prompts them to feel or act more intensely or differently about an issue. The ideal column does both. But.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

82. “Everything I’ve ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

83. “We’ve given Iraq six months and I don’t think things are really working out, so we should probably bring our troops home.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

84. “C’mon kids! Wake up and smell the CO2! Take over your administration building, occupy your university president’s office, or storm in on the next meeting of your college’s board of trustees until they agree to make your school carbon neutral.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

85. “You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It’s exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

87. “I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

88. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

89. “God always forgives. Man often forgives. Nature never forgives. –.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

90. “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.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

91. “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

92. “Some of our bonding moments were times of great tragedy, but there were many happy memories as well. Though we each have since retreated to the different worlds from whence we came, the bond between us will never be broken.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

93. “Average is officially over. When I graduated from college I got to find a job; my girls have to invent theirs. I attended college to learn skills for life, and lifelong learning for me afterward was a hobby. My girls went to college to learn the skills that could garner them their first job, and lifelong learning for them is a necessity for every job thereafter.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

94. “That’s right-the striking thing about greenhouse gases is the diversity of sources that emit them. A herd of cattle belching can be worse than highway full of hummers.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

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

— Thomas L. Friedman

96. “No low-trust society will ever produce sustained innovation.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

97. “When Israelis were indirectly involved in the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, the story was front-page news for weeks. When Lebanese Shiites were directly involved in killing Palestinians in the very same camps from 1985 to 1988, it was almost always back-page news – if it was reported at all. This.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

98. “When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. “You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

99. “I know a lot about this subject because I saw a healthy community get built, brick by brick, block by block, neighbor by neighbor, close up. It was the one that I grew up in: St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

100. “We go to school for twelve or more years during our childhoods and early adulthoods, and then we’re done. But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.”

— Thomas L. Friedman