Thomas Friedman Quotes

The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.

The process by which civilization, as an abstract entity distinct from the societies in which it is embodied, dies or is reborn is a very significant one.

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

One of the things that I'm fascinated about generally is the rise and fall of everything, from civilizations to families to companies.

Everything in culture moves in a cyclical way.

As generations come and go, Their arts, their customs, ebb and flow; Fate, fortune, sweep strong powers away, And feeble, of themselves, decay.

You've never been very generous, you Westerners, toward us Indians. You should have seen that things were changing, albeit slowly. You should have seen that something was happening. Not much, but something.

Change in society is of secondary importance; that will come about naturally, inevitably, when you as a human being bring about the change in yourself.

Sports have always been a huge part of my life and my conversations. It is a thrill and an honor to be a part of this ground-breaking show. I am a competitor at heart, but a true sports fan to my core.

Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century.

It's no accident that of all the monuments left of the Greco- Roman culture the biggest is the ballpark, the Colosseum, the YankeeStadium of ancient times.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times . . .

It is through the multitudinous mass of living human hearts, of human acts and words of love and truth, that the Christ of the first century has become the Christ of the nineteenth.

Every generation wants to be the last. Every generation hates the next trend in music they can't understand. We hate to give up those reins of our culture. To find our own music playing in elevators. The ballad for our revolution, turned into background music for a television commercial. To find our generation's clothes and hair suddenly retro.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

It's important to begin to even consider whether countries can become something that looks very different because people tend to take their countries for granted.

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That's the key to transforming society in the larger arena.

It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organize something, to institutionalize this or that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for 6,000 years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again.

There is no reason to believe that the nature of the violent minorities is now greatly different from what it was in the past. What has changed is the will and ability of the majority to react.

Artists... disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church.

I feel like I have been able to notice throughout the incremental march of history during the course of my own lifetime patterns emerging, and there's a sort of a rubber band effect that happens where social growth and change is concerned.

Civilization is perhaps approaching one of those long winters that overtake it from time to time. Romantic Christendom - picturesque, passionate, unhappy episode - may be coming to an end. Such a catastrophe would be no reason for despair.

Women want to know what's going on, whether it's the guys in the huddle the guys on the couch. One thing that's cool that I've seen as I've grown older is that women now think it is cool to enjoy sports and to sit there and talk the talk and know what's going on.