Thomas Friedman Quotes

This is as true in everyday life as it is in battle: we are given one life and the decision is ours whether to wait for circumstances to make up our mind, or whether to act, and in acting, to live.

When we get to the future, I'll determine the future.

Your one certainty in life, your power as a human being, is that you have a choice in every situation about what you do next and about how you take what has happened to you.

We are not forced into unpleasant activities. We either allow them to come about or we encourage them to come about.

I guess in the end, it doesn’t matter what we wanted. What matters is what we chose to do with the things we had.

Where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power to not act.

We can act instead of being acted upon.

You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.

There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.

We speculate as to what is in store for us. But we not only undergo events, we in part cause them or at least influence their course. We have not only to study them but to act.

The greatest power that a person possesses is the power to choose.

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.

No choice is the wrong choice as long as you make a choice. The only wrong choice is choosing not to make one.

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

If you don't make things happen then things will happen to you.

Circumstances are beyond the control of man; but his conduct is in his own power.

You don't have to be one of those people that accepts things as they are. Every day, take responsibility for changing them right where you are.

People are decisions and actions.

There are two things you can do in politics: you can sit around waiting for things to happen, or you can start doing them.

Nothing happens until you decide.

You gain or lose power according to the choices that you make.

We are not powerless. We have tremendous potential for good or ill. How we choose to use that power is up to us; but first we must choose to use it. We're told every day, You can't change the world. But the world is changing every day. Only question is who's doing it? You or somebody else?

If we want things to be okay, we will have to make things okay.

What people have the capacity to choose, they have the ability to change.