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Once people get a taste for whatever you want to call it - economic independence, a better lifestyle, and a better life for their children - they grab on to that and don't want to give it up.

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
Better
Grab
Giving
Lifestyle
Children
Independence
Life
Taste
People
Economic
Call
Whatever
Give

More quotes by Thomas Friedman

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Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
Thomas Friedman
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To me the smart thing that governments in the Middle East would be doing right now is taking their oil and gas fountain - and the smartest ones are to some degree - and making sure they're investing in their people to unlock their potential - men and women.
Thomas Friedman
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Arnold Schwarzenegger said it best: Your son is sick. Ninety-eight doctors give you one diagnosis, two doctors give you another. Who are you going to go with? Well, why would it be the conservative position to go with the two? That's not conservative, that's crazy.
Thomas Friedman
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If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.
Thomas Friedman
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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.
Thomas Friedman
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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.
Thomas Friedman
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We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.
Thomas Friedman
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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.
Thomas Friedman
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I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.
Thomas Friedman
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I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.
Thomas Friedman
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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.
Thomas Friedman
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Hope and optimism aren't just attitudes, they are life strategies.
Thomas Friedman
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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.
Thomas Friedman
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Supply chains cannot tolerate even 24 hours of disruption. So if you lose your place in the supply chain because of wild behavior you could lose a lot. It would be like pouring cement down one of your oil wells.
Thomas Friedman
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Our kids are going to be so angry with us one day. We've charged their future on our Visa cards.
Thomas Friedman
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Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.
Thomas Friedman
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What every employer is looking for is not someone who can do the job, but someone who can reinvent the job.
Thomas Friedman
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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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The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once remarked that if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you five, that is a mistake. But if you ask a man how much is two plus two and he tells you ninety-seven, that is no longer a mistake. The man you are talking to is operating with a wholly different logic from your own.
Thomas Friedman
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I don't think a monarchy led by 75- and 80-year-old men [Saudi Arabia] in today's modern world is really sustainable.
Thomas Friedman