Thomas Friedman Quotes - Page 7

Syria is on the back end of basically a decade-long drought. Over the last decade, farmers and herders have been ravaged in Syria forcing them to give up and move to urban areas. This has put a huge strain on urban resources, and it's surely one of the reasons for the uprising there.

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

I don't know what the average income of Muslim-Americans is, but Muslim-American immigrants of recent vintage, I bet they have a very above-average representation in professional and business occupations.

Iraq today does have a chance to shape its own future. They may not do that, or this generation may not do that. But maybe the next one will, I don't know. They may try and fail, and stumble, get up and fall back.

The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

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.

The Middle East would always be an important trading partner in just a market sense, like America is a big market for us, Asia is a big market, Europe is a big market. You are going to have hundreds of millions of consumers there, from just a standard market point of view, from a very narrow American point of view.

America is interested in change and reform in the Middle East but in a stable way.

There is a connection between energy, climate, food and political stability. That has played out in the Arab awakening and is not done playing out.

In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny.

Golf has an ambivalent relationship with the environment. On one hand, it's a great preserver of open spaces. Golf doesn't pave the world - it helps to green the world. But the downside is, it uses a lot of fertilizer, pesticides and water. And this is in a world where we know that synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are toxic, and water is more and more scarce. Golf could do a lot more.

Water is our next great environmental challenge. It is the new oil. How are we going to preserve this sport unless we are designing and maintaining golf courses that are energy net zero, carbon net zero and water net zero? Or ideally, energy positive, carbon positive and water positive, where they are taking out more than they are using.

The financial crisis just made the hole deeper, which is why our stimulus needs to be both big and smart, both financially and educationally stimulating. It needs to be able to produce not only more shovel-ready jobs and shovel-ready workers, but more Google-ready jobs and Windows-ready and knowledge-ready workers.

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

I'm pretty much an open book. I am a fanatic golfer and golf nut. If I have three free hours any day, my first choice is to run to the golf course if the weather is nice.

I don't think a monarchy led by 75- and 80-year-old men [Saudi Arabia] in today's modern world is really sustainable.

My mother-in-law says if you want to live like a Republican, vote like a Democrat. That if you are a part of the group that is doing well in this system, you owe it to yourself and to others to look out for them and make sure you are always building a ladder for others to join you.

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

If I were advising President Obama, since he's the one running, I would have made his campaign very simple. I promise that in four years, I will get more Americans, as many as I possibly can, the opportunity and access to some form of post-secondary education. I want more of them to graduate high school with the skill-set of post-secondary education and I want more of them to be able to obtain that post-secondary education. This is the only way we are going to close the income gap.

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

There are elites that are real leaders and role models. There are elites that are really selfish and want to pull up the ladder once they've reached the roof.

If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards.

It's easy to kind of say it's the elite that's putting you down. Well, it wasn't really the elite, technology will do that.

The Arab world had a big problem of frankly venal elites. That is why these revolutions happen, because people didn't think the opportunities were being shared fairly.