Thomas Friedman Quotes

The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

Yes, there are lots of individual exceptions. But no one has ever done a study about voting intention without ascertaining that the biggest determining factor is your income and your wealth.

My father had to flee from what is today Pakistan when he was a child, and he became a manager at IBM, and any item of consumption he would acquire was a direct measurement of his success in life. But that same equation wasn't going to work for me - I was quite clear about that in my early teens.

For a number of years, I've wondered if people like us are the forgotten. We're not the poor, and we're not the rich. We're not the very young or the aged. We're the average American family.

Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire population of America is walking past you in a single file of ascending income. The owners of losing businesses are invisible; their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor who are midgets. After half an hour, the strollers are still only waste high as the median income is have the mean [average].… Then the normal size people enter. Soon, giants thunder by and are 12 feet tall and they get taller. When the last 400 people walk by at the end, each is two miles tall.

Our parents’ incomes play a larger role in our personal economic fortunes than is true for other peer countries.

I was as middle class as it comes.

I can tell you I'm pretty middle-class.

The middle has not enough class that I think about the middle class.

The average income in France is $1,000 a month, and you can't live decently on that.

The standard of living of the average American has to decline.

Everyone has a telephone. Whether they can afford it or not. It's one of those things that people have, regardless of their income.

I come from very conservative parents, and we weren't particularly wealthy, but we were comfortable.

I didn't say one negative word about poor people or about middle-class people or anything else. All I said was that the rich deserve our gratitude.

Gold gives an appearance of beauty even to ugliness: But with poverty everything becomes frightful.

When asked what was the proper time for supper: If you are a rich man, whenever you please; and if you are a poor man, whenever you can.

Class is a way of looking at society that divides people into different categories based on how much money they're willing to make.

Modernity needs to understand that being rich and becoming rich are not mathematically, personally, socially, and ethically the same thing.

The accumulation of wealth is a process which is of itself morally neutral. True, as Christianity teaches, riches bring temptations. But then so does poverty.

Poor whites didn't have rights. They made all kind of restrictions on voting. So person meant relatively well - off, free white man.

The rich want good wine, the poor, plenty of wine

If you’re still poor at 35, you deserve it.

The average woman loses a half million dollars over a lifetime, but women with higher degrees lose $2 million over a lifetime.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed.