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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.

Thomas Friedman

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Thomas Friedman
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: July 20
Columnist
Journalist
Screenwriter
Television Producer
Writer
Saint Louis Park
Minnesota
Thomas Loren Friedman
Thomas L. Friedman
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Sober
Movement
Scale
Challenges
Paying
Call
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Attention
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More quotes by Thomas Friedman

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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.
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No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's
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What we do know is that the planet is going from 7 billion people today to 9 billion. More people want to live like us, drive American- size cars, live in an American-size home, and eat American-size Big Macs. What does that mean? It means that energy demand is going to be going up.
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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.
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We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.
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If e-mail had been around before the telephone was invented, people would have said, 'Hey, forget e-mail! With this new telephone invention I can actually talk to people!'.
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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.
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Everyone needs to get together and say: Our objective is to preserve and enhance the game and the planet on which it's played. To make golf a leader in greening the world.
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No matter what your profession – doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant – if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer.
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The great thing about cheap natural gas, again it's cheap, and it provides a cleaner alternative to coal. But it's still a fossil fuel, and because it's still a fossil fuel, it still emits carbon.
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You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept.
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Yes, the world is now flat for publishing as well.
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When you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn't four percent, it's 100 percent.
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The country that owns green, that dominates that industry, is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, competitive companies, healthy population and, most of all, global respect.
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The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together.
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In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem.
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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.
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Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
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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.
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Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.
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