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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.

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
Selfish
Leaders
Models
Ladder
Role
Ladders
Roles
Elites
Leader
Roof
Real
Reached
Really
Pull

More quotes by Thomas Friedman

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In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them.
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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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Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.
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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.
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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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Two things are going on at the same time with the flattening of the world: The relentless quest for efficiency is squeezing some of the fat out of life.
Thomas Friedman
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You'll know the green revolution has been won when the word 'green' disappears.
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Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.
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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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America needs rebooting.
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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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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.
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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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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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If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.
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When you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn't four percent, it's 100 percent.
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What we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues.
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The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels.
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Only if you give the Palestinians something to lose is there a hope that they will agree to moderate their demands.... I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands.
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We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that.
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