George Friedman Quotes

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.

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.

Italy spills over to everything. Italy is a huge banking system. It has been the major banking system in Eastern Europe. It's worked with Austria's banking system. There's all sorts of interplays there. So it's not the PIIGS one should worry about. Germany hasn't even begun falling yet. And when Germany falls, and it will, that's when the panic begins to set in.

The warrior must continue to make decisions in the face of extreme circumstances. He cannot afford to get angry or frightened.

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.

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.

One of the great famines in human history took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [At the same time] Western journalists were reporting how marvelously Chinese society was working. We know so little [about what happens in China].

When you're young and going to war, it's a genuinely exciting moment. You are going to risk yourself. On the battlefield, you are suddenly free. You realize: I'm here, I'm in it. Exaltation. Suddenly you're hit by another extraordinary feeling: my God, I can be killed. And: will I embarrass myself? It's like you're in a kaleidoscope and all of these extraordinary feelings are zipping by.

By the 20th century, war ceased to be an encounter between two armies. It became an encounter between two societies, because a factory worker producing a gun or a bomb is as deadly as a pilot.

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.

The Chinese have a long history of slaughtering each other without bothering their neighbors.

When I went to war, I did not go making geopolitical calculations. I went to war with a lust.

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.

Now if you can recognize and memorize a grandmaster's game, and you have the respect to understand [Zimbabwean president Robert] Mugabe who has survived past anyone's expectations, and make the simple assumption it wasn't an accident, and you understand why he did what he did, now you're ready to predict ... The key to forecasting is to understand both the constraints nations are under and the manner in which the struggle for power shapes leaders.

There has never been a century that has not had a systemic war - a systemic war, meaning when the entire system convulses. From the Seven Years' War in Europe to the Napoleonic Wars of the 19th century to the World Wars, every century has one.

The United State has a net worth against which our debt is a joke ... we wrote in 2008 the United States is going to come out of this recession fast. The Europeans are going to fragment. The Chinese are going to be cremated. Why could we come out of it? Why has all economic theory been proven wrong? Because we're rich and we could afford it.

The man who hates war more than he hates the Nazis is a wicked man.

It has always struck me as the world's great fortune that the two great superpowers were the United States and the Soviet Union, who managed the Cold War with meticulous care in retrospect. Imagine the European diplomats of 1914 or 1938 armed with nuclear weapons. It is easy to believe they would not have been as cautious.

A century is about events. A decade is about people.

The important thing in war is that there is an element of rage, but you must remain very distant from it.

The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human - community - originates in the inhumanity of war.

Success looks like you sitting here pretty confident that an armed brigade isn't going to come pouring in here and blow your head off. Which I don't think is your major concern. Therefore, the United States' foreign policy is successful.

The first thing you have to do is understand what success looks like. And to understand what success looks like you have to understand the intent. If you understand that intent is to make sure the sea lines are secure, then suddenly bombing Kosovo makes sense, because you don't want Serbia to reemerge as a major power.

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

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