Thomas Friedman Quotes

Hurry, conscious younger people! Get to power quickly so political decisions can be based on the greater good for all rather than the greater gain for few. Hurry, before it is too late!

A society based on … reality must reconcile in its life, the categories of permanence and change.

Please, join the modern world.

It is the same with people as it is with riding a bike. Only when moving can one comfortably maintain one's balance.

Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what "is" that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?

I think it holds up pretty good because more and more women are coming to the forefront in all areas, and back then they said that nobody would care about women's friendship.

People are like bicycles. They can keep their balance only as long as they keep moving.

We need young people to be involved, and we have to expect that young people are going to be impatient, they don't want to wait, and they've got new ideas and new ways of looking at problems.

I don't think there will ever be a time when people will stop wanting to bring about change.

I understand that and I have had very candid discussions with Saudi leaders in the past. I respect their culture and their heritage and their traditions, but I think that they now, as they move forward, will have to start examining these traditions and these practices to see whether or not change is appropriate.

You can't move so fast that you try to change the mores faster than people can accept it.

In fact, Christianity has been one of the great salivations on planet Earth. It's what's necessary in the Middle East. Others have written about it, I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity but I'll get here a little later, I'll move up to that. It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings.

Not all revolutionaries set out to change the world per se; some set out to change their own worlds. And in so doing, they often change the way one person, or a few people, or whole communities, or entire nations or the world thinks and operates in some significant way.

We gotta ditch conservatism and people that believe it, we gotta move on. Otherwise, if we don't, we're just delaying our nightmare, postponing the nightmare. That's Ford O'Connell.

The greatest thing to me about Obama is not the individual, it does not have to do with Obama himself - it's really about the people who have elected Obama. It demonstrates that people are ready for change, and I think Obama knows that, because he really came up from the people, the young generation especially. He motivated a lot of African Americans who never voted before to go and vote.

people with a sense of fulfillment think it is a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change.

I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?

I think the center ground have got to become the people of change again and not the guardians of the status quo. And that is the weakness it comes to in our campaign. You can see it in your politics, you can see it everywhere.

Germany and France are pinning their hopes on young people, in terms of education, science and innovation.

I still think that it's time for something that reflects the American people.

My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more.

A culture must be reasonably stable, but it must also change, and it will presumably be strongest if it can avoid excessive respect for tradition and fear of novelty on the one hand and excessively rapid change on the other.

But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

My principles and core beliefs haven't changed in many years. You know, I don't change what I think with the wind just in order to perhaps attract more people. I am what I am, believe what I believe, and I say so.

The time must come when, great and pressing as change and betterment may be, they do not involve killing and hurting people.