Thomas Friedman Quotes
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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.
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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.
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What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.
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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.
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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.
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Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home.
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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.
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It is hard to partner with someone when you become so radioactive no one wants to stand next to you.
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Desktop freelancers and innovative startups all over the world
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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.
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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.
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We have to be the best global citizens we can be.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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Every golf course should have its carbon rating on the scorecard, alongside its Course Rating, Slope, par and yardage.
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Tap into people's dignity and they will do anything for you. Ignore it, and they won't lift a finger.
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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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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.
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America is interested in change and reform in the Middle East but in a stable way.
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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.
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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.
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I am always a little skeptical on the water thing because I have been hearing that for 30 years, but one year it's going to be true. With the rising populations, Yemen could be the first country in the world, or Sana'a the first major city in the world, to run out of water, that's from Yemeni hydrological engineers and the United Nations. Sooner or later, all of these people, from 7 to 9 billion, all of them want to live like America, will be consuming so much more water that some of the societies will hit a wall without more sustainable environmental practices.
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You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
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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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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.
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Hope and optimism aren't just attitudes, they are life strategies.
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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.
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