110+ Thomas Friedman Quotes On Israel, Gaza And Taxes

Thomas Friedman is an American journalist, author, and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He is best known for his foreign affairs column in The New York Times, which has been published since 1995. He is also the author of several books, including The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thomas Friedman on israel, gaza, taxes.

Top 10 Thomas Friedman Quotes

1. What every employer is looking for is not someone who can do the job, but someone who can reinvent the job.
2. Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.
3. I've always believed the world would be a better place if more people everywhere have a chance to shape their own future and realize their full potential. I think that is what life is about.
4. Remember, in China when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.
5. No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's
6. Hope and optimism aren't just attitudes, they are life strategies.
7. When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.
8. Guantanamo Bay is the anti-Statue of Liberty.
9. I firmly believe that the next great breakthrough in bioscience could come from a 15-year-old who downloads the human genome in Egypt.
10. The first rule of holes is when you're in one, stop digging. When you're in three, bring a lot of shovels.

Thomas Friedman Short Quotes

• Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.
• Our kids are going to be so angry with us one day. We've charged their future on our Visa cards.
• We need to become energy independent or at least aspire to that.
• When you lose your job, the unemployment rate isn't four percent, it's 100 percent.
• Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards.
• Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed
• Desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world
• Iraq may still have a decent outcome...but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.
• America is interested in change and reform in the Middle East but in a stable way.
• If you don't visit the bad neighborhoods, the bad neighborhoods are going to visit you.

Thomas Friedman Quotes About Global

We have to be the best global citizens we can be. — Thomas Friedman

The reason that we are becoming less equal is because of the greater requirements, secure requirements, for a good job. This goes back to the '80s basically, this started changing as globalization and the IT revolution merged, and each started to drive the other. — Thomas Friedman

I could see America playing a slightly smaller role in the Middle East but I would not see us abandoning the region and just say "Oh," like I said, "China, Russia, it's yours now. Global focus is just on our hemisphere." I don't see that happening. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of globalization. [...] The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

Thomas Friedman Quotes About Political

Change your leaders, not your light bulbs. — Thomas Friedman

A generation ago [the Democratic Party] stood for progressive change. Now they defend every federal program as if each were sacred. They have become the most conservative force in American politics. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

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

Thomas Friedman Famous Quotes And Sayings

When I was growing up, my parents told me, 'Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' I tell my daughters, 'Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.' — Thomas Friedman

Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction - out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East - is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest. — Thomas Friedman

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

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. — Thomas Friedman

The thing you have to remember is, oil and gas are commodities, and the more we use them the more the price goes up, like any commodity. Solar, wind - they are technologies, so the more you use them, the more the price goes down. — Thomas Friedman

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. — Thomas Friedman

By 'flat' I did not mean that the world is getting equal. I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before. That's why an Indian in Bangalore can take care of the office work of American doctors or read the X-rays of German hospitals. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

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

You take one bomber and deploy him in Baghdad, and another is manufactured in Riyadh the next day. It's exactly like when you take the toy off the shelf at Wal-Mart and another is made in Shen Zhen the next day. — Thomas Friedman

I am hoping, though, that many of them have kids, who, when they have a moment to take a break from their iPods, Internet, or Google, will explain to their parents running the country just how the world is being flattened. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

The Arab awakening has been, up to now, a lot about freedom from dictatorial regimes - Syria, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt. But once you got freedom from, then you need freedom to. Freedom from is about destroying things. Freedom to is about constructing things, constructing the rule of law. — Thomas Friedman

What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth. — Thomas Friedman

What if we're wrong and there is no climate change? Well, by doing everything possible to address it, we will still use less water, stimulate new energy savings and, in time, money-saving technologies, enjoy cleaner air, and preserve more forests and trees and animals. — Thomas Friedman

We're going in the wrong direction and I think the only way to counter that is to bring the story home in really concrete ways to people - in ways that kids can understand and non-scientists can understand. — Thomas Friedman

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!'. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

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

It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money; it is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence. — Thomas Friedman

What is the most entrepreneurial country in the Middle East today? It's Lebanon. Which country has no oil or gas? Lebanon. The same was true of Israel, the same was of Bahrain. You could see a real gradation. Turkey, for instance: no oil and gas, very entrepreneurial. You can either dig your future out of the ground or you can unlock the potential of your people. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. — Thomas Friedman

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

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

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

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. — Thomas Friedman

America needs rebooting. — Thomas Friedman

A vision without resources is an hallucination. — Thomas Friedman

Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home. — Thomas Friedman

Scientists tend to focus on what they don't know more than what they do know. And there are a lot of things we still don't know about the climate. But we know the difference between climate variability and climate change, and right now the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is well outside the variability pattern - and that's quite quantifiable. — Thomas Friedman

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

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. — Thomas Friedman

That's right-the striking thing about greenhouse gases is the diversity of sources that emit them. A herd of cattle belching can be worse than highway full of hummers. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem. — Thomas Friedman

I don't think that stability and the status quo go together at all, not in a flat world where people are integrated, where women are assuming new roles, where young people want to be consulted and participate. I think the trick is to open up, move down the path of reform, do it in a way that is consistent with your own society's stability and culture, and just don't think you can do nothing. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

Obviously China is clearly taking the lead in some areas, but when it comes to the most advanced innovation, it's still America. — Thomas Friedman

I think the Arab awakening has changed everything and I think a lot will depend on what people there ask of us, may be nothing, it may be a lot. I think that really depends how they find their voice and what they see as their real interest, and hopefully that would be for more schools and not more tanks. — Thomas Friedman

I think there are different kinds of elites. I think there are venal elites, and self-interested elites, and selfish elites, and I think there are visionary elites. — Thomas Friedman

When you can't rely on sticking a pipe in the ground, what you have to rely on is unlocking the energy and talent of all your people - men and women. — Thomas Friedman

Everything I’ve ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids. — Thomas Friedman

Many of us who grew up playing golf know that our kids aren't doing it. A great way to enhance the game, make it cool again and bring back some of the interest among younger people is to make golf the greenest sport in an environmental sense. Every course's greenkeeper should think of himself or herself as the greenkeeper: responsible for preserving the green, not just the greens. — Thomas Friedman

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. — Thomas Friedman

C'mon kids! Wake up and smell the CO2! Take over your administration building, occupy your university president's office, or storm in on the next meeting of your college's board of trustees until they agree to make your school carbon neutral. — Thomas Friedman

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

Something really big happened in the world's wiring in the last decade, but it was obscured by the financial crisis and post-9/11. We went from a connected world to a hyperconnected world. I'm always struck that Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high-speech broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago. — Thomas Friedman

In a hyper-connected world where average is over, there is one thing we know absolutely for sure: Every good job will require more education. — Thomas Friedman

Combating climate change requires government policy, and most conservatives hate the idea of more government regulation. Because they hate the prescription, they deny the diagnosis. — Thomas Friedman

Your boss doesn't care what you know, because the Google machine knows everything. Your boss cares about what you can do with what you know. That's the only thing your boss will pay for. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

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

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. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

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

In the future, how we educate our children may prove to be more important than how much we educate them. — Thomas Friedman

The Arab awakening was like watching elephants fly: something you didn't expect, something you haven't seen before, "Wow, elephants fly." — Thomas Friedman

We've given Iraq six months and I don't think things are really working out, so we should probably bring our troops home. — Thomas Friedman

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

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. — Thomas Friedman

America was the funder of petro-dictatorships. We treated all these countries as basically big, large gas stations: Libya station, Iraq station, Iran station, Egypt station, Syria station, and all we asked of them were three things: Keep your palms open, your prices low and don't bother Israel too much, and you can do whatever you want to your own people. — Thomas Friedman

Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger. — Thomas Friedman

Al Qaeda is nothing more than a mutant supply chain. They're playing off the same platform as Wal-Mart and Dell. They're just not restrained by it. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain. That's what we're up against in Iraq. We're up against a suicide supply chain. — Thomas Friedman

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

The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people-men and women-rather than drill an oil well. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

I think we have lost our groove as a country. One of the reasons was the attack on 9/11. We got knocked off our game. From a country that always exported hope we went into the business of exporting fear. — Thomas Friedman

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

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

Communism was a great system for making people equally poor - in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich. — Thomas Friedman

Even if America tomorrow - and it won't happen overnight - but if we did reduce our demand for gas and natural gas and crude oil by a significant degree, that does have an exponential effect on producers in the Middle East, everything else being equal. But if China's demand is growing and India's demand is growing, they are not going back. — Thomas Friedman

Why is it Muslims from Pakistan or from Egypt come to America and thrive, and they are frustrated back home? It's about clean government. It's about a rule of law. It's about intellectual property protection. They've got all the talent and energy of anybody else. As new immigrants they may have more of it, so you put them in our system and they become doctors, lawyers, and businessmen and entrepreneurs. — Thomas Friedman

If you don't visit a bad neighborhood, it might visit you. — Thomas Friedman

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. — Thomas Friedman

If you want to get an advance machine tool job today, you need to know calculus. We know a lot of people don't, we can't expect everyone to know calculus, what do we do? We created a huge bubble that created a huge number of jobs to build houses and to be in retail. You don't have to have a lot of skills to work in the new Gap store that opened, at the latest Starbucks branch, or to hammer a nail for a new house. — Thomas Friedman

There is something more severe than the problem with Thomas Friedman, which can be generalized to represent someone causing action while being completely unaccountable for his words. — Thomas Friedman

I think no country is going to be immune from the Arab awakening because the Arab awakening is driven by deep human longing for dignity, for justice and for freedom. I think that applies to young people in Saudi Arabia as much as to young people in Egypt, Tunisia, or Yemen, or Libya, or Syria. If I were in Saudi Arabia, I would be getting ahead of this and looking for ways to appreciate those aspirations and align my country with them. — Thomas Friedman

We are entering a hyperconnected world where every boss now has more access, cheap access to cheap labor, cheap genius, cheap robot, cheap software, and then this world averages over. There is only one answer to that, and that is to get everyone as close as possible to some form of post-secondary education, it could be vocational, it can be liberal arts, it can be science and technology. — Thomas Friedman

I don't think the Arab Spring had much to do with energy. I think it was just the opposite, in fact. I think the Arab Spring happened because particularly young people knew they were living in a context where they could not realize their full potential, that they are being kept down by their own governments. — Thomas Friedman

Some would ask which country am I from? We are supposed to tell the truth, [so] we tell them India. Some thought it was Indiana, not India! Some did not know where India is. I said it is the country next to Pakistan. — Thomas Friedman

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

Life Lessons by Thomas Friedman

1. Thomas Friedman's work emphasizes the importance of global interconnectedness and the need to think on a global scale.
2. He encourages readers to be open-minded and to look at the world from different perspectives.
3. He also stresses the importance of understanding the complexities of global affairs and the need for collaboration and cooperation between countries.