Thomas Friedman Quotes - Page 3

The unemployment rate today for people with our-year college degrees is 4.1%, which is almost none. That's people switching jobs basically. That tells you that education is the only way up and the only way out. If that is the fact, then we've got to get more of it for more people.

Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.

Iraq may still have a decent outcome...but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.

So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist...If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.

In the hyperconnected world, there is only “good” “better” and “best.

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer's travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

America needs rebooting.

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.

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

I have no problem with a war for oil-if we accompany it with a real program for energy conservation. But when we tell the world we couldn't care less about climate change, that we feel entitled to drive whatever big cars we feel like, that we feel entitled to consume however much oil we like, the message we send is that a war for oil in the gulf is not a war to protect the world's right to economic survival-but our right to indulge. Now that will be seen as immoral.

I think that competition will exist even if we discover more oil. We're never going to know how much we have, or how long will it last. You are always going to want to have diversity of supply. I think the Middle East will remain a region of competition, of global competition, fighting for a long time.

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

If we don't have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages...change.

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

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

I am always a little skeptical on the water thing because I have been hearing that for 30 years, but one year it's going to be true. With the rising populations, Yemen could be the first country in the world, or Sana'a the first major city in the world, to run out of water, that's from Yemeni hydrological engineers and the United Nations. Sooner or later, all of these people, from 7 to 9 billion, all of them want to live like America, will be consuming so much more water that some of the societies will hit a wall without more sustainable environmental practices.

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.

You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept.