Thomas Friedman Quotes

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.

By now, it seems as if everyone has already read Thomas L. Friedman's 'The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.' It changed the way we think about global business, competitiveness and the implication for far-flung economies, governments, education and more.

When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces.

It created a global platform that allowed more people to plug and play, collaborate and compete, share knowledge and share work, than anything we have ever seen in the history of the world.

We're in a 21st century, transparent and connected world.

We have collapsed distances, taken down walls, and spread information.

Long distances used to be a moat that both insulated and isolated people from workers on the other side of the world. But every day, technology narrows that moat inch by inch. Every person in the world is on the verge of becoming both a coworker and a competitor to every one of us ... Technological change is going to reach out and sooner or later change something fundamental in your business world.

In the era of mobile phones and emails, you're no more out of the loop in China than you are in Sydney.

You're sort of programmed a certain way because of your environment. That's all you know. But we don't have that anymore because of the internet. Because of the internet we're all communicating with each other all across the board, so you're getting information from people all around the world, hitting a much more diverse slice of culture.

The Internet offers untold potential for humanity. To make the most of it, we need to think of the Internet as 'ours.'

In the next 10 years, I expect at least five billion people worldwide to own smartphones, giving every individual with such a phone instant access to the full power of the Internet, every moment of every day.

In Globalization 1.0, which began around 1492, the world went from size large to size medium. In Globalization 2.0, the era that introduced us to multinational companies, it went from size medium to size small. And then around 2000 came Globalization 3.0, in which the world went from being small to tiny.

Humankind is getting more and more connected.

India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.

You have to have access to ideas. The Internet is facilitating that access to ideas. In 25 years, the way that data's going to flow back and forth, we don't quite understand yet.

Those who are mastering more and more the communications revolution, those who realize that there are no borders in the world, are the ones who are going to leap ahead.

What the global delivery model allows is, it allows you to take previously geographically core-located tasks, break them up into parts, send them around the world where the expertise and the cost structure exists, and then specify the means for reintegrating them.

I was in Bangalore, India, the Silicon Valley of India, when I realized that the world was flat.

The entire world is now a rival to Silicon Valley. No country, state, region, nor city has a lock on innovation in technology anymore.

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village.

Men knew little, formerly, of what was passing beyond ... their own immediate neighborhood, but now, through the ... newspapers ... town and country, state and nation, and the most distant parts of the world are brought together, and whatever is new, rare and important, is conveyed with rapidity to every reader ... set forth in the most succinct manner, and in a style adapted to the comprehension of all.

Technology has miniaturized the globe, reducing vast oceans to mere ponds. Distant countries are now almost neighbors as our bodies travel faster than the speed of sound and our voices at the speed of light. ... Today the world is not much bigger than a ball spinning on the finger of science.

As the world of chips and glass fibers and wireless waves goes, so goes the rest of the world

Progress in a globally interdependent society relies more than ever on the unimpeded flow of information.

In this digital age, it doesn't really matter if you are in Canary Wharf or the Caribbean; there are opportunities waiting to be grasped by entrepreneurs.