Top 140 Thomas L. Friedman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “Culture is nested in context, not genes.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

103. “It was like working in a dark cave with the aid of a single candle. Just when you thought you had spotted the white light of Truth, you would chase it, only to discover that it was someone else, also holding a candle, also looking for the light. A.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

104. “One is that you should never take no for an answer. There is always some way to make a sale if you have confidence in your merchandise. Just because a customer says no doesn’t mean he isn’t buying. You just have to sift your way through all the rhetoric and get to the heart of the deal. The.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

105. “Companies are now experimenting not just with ways to change the pulse or the color of light to create more capacity, but also with new ways of shaping that light that can deliver more than one hundred trillion bits per second down their fiber lines.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

106. “It is always dangerous to declare a turning point in history. We always tend to feel that, when we are alive, something really major is happening.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

107. “Teller tells his teams: “I don’t care how much progress you make this month; my job is to cause your rate of improvement to increase – how do we make the same mistake in half the time for half the money?” In sum, said Teller, what we are experiencing today, with shorter and shorter innovation cycles, and less and less time to learn to adapt, “is the difference between a constant state of destabilization versus occasional destabilization.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

108. “Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

109. “Technology creates possibilities for new behaviors and experiences and connection,” he added, “but it takes human beings to make the behaviors principled, the experiences meaningful and connections deeper and rooted in shared values and aspirations.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

110. “A Mexican newspaper recently ran a story about how the Converse shoe company was making tennis shoes in China using Mexican glue. “The whole article was about why are we giving them our glue,” said Zedillo, “when the right attitude would be, How much more glue can we sell them? We still need to break some mental barriers.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

111. “What makes America unique is not that it built MIT, or that its grads are generating economic growth and innovation, but that every state in the country has universities trying to do the same. “America has 4,000 colleges and universities,” said Allan E. Goodman, president of the Institute of International Education. “The rest of the world combined has 7,768 institutions of higher education.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

112. “The rabbi stated: When you look into the face of the person who is beside you, and you can see that person is your brother or your sister, then finally the night has ended, and the day has begun. Hastening that heavenly day, is the moral work of our generation.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

113. “We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. – Louis Brandeis.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

114. “To be sure, there will always be evil in the world, there will always be criminality, there will always be swindlers who use the fruits of technological progress or the freedom of cyberspace to cheat the community or their neighbor or a stranger. To talk about how to better govern such realms is always, at best, to talk about increasing the odds of restraining more bad behaviors than not – because they will never be eliminated. The.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

115. “This gruesome and absurd doorstep suicide symbolized for me the mood of Beirut at the end of 1983 and in early 1984 – a mood of dashed hopes and utter desperation. The Marines had come to Beirut to project strength, presence, security, and calm, while the Lebanese resolved their differences and rebuilt their nation.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

116. “People will change their habits quickly IF they have a strong reason for doing so.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

117. “Development is a voluntary process. You need a positive decision to make the right steps, but it starts with introspection.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

118. “Social media is good for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building; good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction; fantastic for generating a flash mob, but not so good at generating a flash consensus on a party platform or a constitution.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

119. “Social media is great for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building. Good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

120. “But a growing number of studies, including my own research, suggest that geographic proximity and cultural diversity – a place’s openness to different cultures, religions, sexual orientations – also play key roles in economic growth. Skeptics.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

121. “Social conservatives from the right wing of the Republican party, who do not like globalization or closer integration with the world because it brings too many foreigners and foreign cultural mores into America, might align themselves with unions from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who don’t like globalization for the way it facilitates the outsourcing and offshoring of jobs. They might be called the Wall Party...”

— Thomas L. Friedman

122. “The job of the politician in America, whether at the local, state, or national level, should be, in good part, to help educate and explain to people what world they are living in and what they need to do if they want to thrive within it.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

123. “If you want to solve a big problem, you need to go from taking credit, to sharing credit, to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit. Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership. And the byproduct is both resilience and propulsion.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

124. “No athlete, no scientist, no musician ever got better without focused practice, and there is no program you can download for that. It has to come from within.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

125. “I got to see with my own eyes the boundaries of men’s compassion alongside their unfathomable brutality, their ingenuity alongside astounding folly, their insanity alongside their infinite ability to endure. Of.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

126. “We are generating more information and knowledge than ever today, “but knowledge is only good if you can reflect on it.” And.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

127. “As the world speeds up, stocks of knowledge depreciate at a faster rate.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

128. “Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

129. “But there is another statistic, much harder to measure, that I think is even more important and revealing: Does your society have more memories than dreams or more dreams than memories?”

— Thomas L. Friedman

130. “Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner – people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework – people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” And in a flat world, they can have them, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker – wherever he or she resides.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

131. “Most lost jobs are outsourced to the past.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

132. “Lin Wells, who teaches strategy at the National Defense University. According to Wells, it is fanciful to suppose that you can opine about or explain this world by clinging to the inside or outside of any one rigid explanatory box or any single disciplinary silo. Wells describes three ways of thinking about a problem: “inside the box,” “outside the box,” and “where there is no box.” The only sustainable approach to thinking today about problems, he argues, “is thinking without a box.” Of.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

133. “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

134. “One of the strengths of Labor Zionism had always been its strong pragmatic outlook, its philosophy that a new reality can be built only by careful planning and then constructing things brick by brick, acre after acre. It.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

135. “Not surprisingly, the experience set my mind whirring. And not surprisingly, my meetings with Bojia soon led me to start asking myself the same questions I was asking him to explore: What is my value set and where did it come from? How do I think the Machine works today? And what have I learned about how different peoples and cultures are being impacted by the Machine and responding to it? That’s what I started doing – in the pause – and the rest of this book is my answer.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

136. “The principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

137. “Individual cities that now do the same thing can reap the benefits. So this isn’t complicated: the most educated people who plug into the most flows and enjoy the best governance and infrastructure win. They will have the most data to mine; they will see the most new ideas first; they will be challenged by them first and able to respond and take advantage of them first. Being in the flow will constitute a significant strategic and economic advantage.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

138. “This ain’t no cloud, folks! And so, instead of calling this new creative energy source “the cloud,” this book will henceforth use the term that Craig Mundie, the computer designer from Microsoft, once suggested. I will call it “the supernova” – a computational supernova. The.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

139. “There is nothing called ‘underprivileged’ anymore,” said Yildiz. “All you need is a working brain, some short training, and then put your idea into a fantastic business from any part of the world!”

— Thomas L. Friedman

140. “We have grown addicted to our high salaries, and now we are really going to have to earn them,” the CEO said.”

— Thomas L. Friedman

141. “Virulence is the sound of a self-selecting community talking to itself and positively reinforcing itself with no obligation to answer to anyone or look anyone in the eye.”

— Thomas L. Friedman