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When People Get Frustrated, It's When They Feel They Are Living In A Context That Deprives Them Of Dignity, Deprives Them Of Justice And Deprives Them Of The Freedom To Realize Their Full Potential, And That To Me Is What The Arab Awakening Was All About. I Think It Applied To Every Country, And So I Have Been An Unmitigated Supporter Of It.

-Thomas Friedman

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When People Get Frustrated,

Thomas Friedman

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When People Get Frustrated, It's When They Feel They Are Living In A Context That Deprives Them Of Dignity, Deprives Them Of Justice And Deprives Them Of The Freedom To Realize Their Full Potential, And That To Me Is What The Arab Awakening Was All About. I Think It Applied To Every Country, And So I Have Been An Unmitigated Supporter Of It.

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Two Things Are Going On At The Same Time With The Flattening Of The World: The Relentless Quest For Efficiency Is Squeezing Some Of The Fat Out Of Life.

Rock Stars Get Room Keys, I Get Business Cards.

The Arab Awakening Was Like Watching Elephants Fly: Something You Didn't Expect, Something You Haven't Seen Before, "wow, Elephants Fly."

There Is No Substitute For Face-to-face Reporting And Research.

Never Before In The History Of The Planet Have So Many People, On Their Own, Had The Ability To Find So Much Information About So Many Things And About So Many Other People.

Almost All The Students Who Make It To Caltech, One Of The Best Scientific Universities In The World, Come From Public Schools. So It Can Be Done.

I Don't Know What The Average Income Of Muslim-americans Is, But Muslim-american Immigrants Of Recent Vintage, I Bet They Have A Very Above-average Representation In Professional And Business Occupations.

In The Hyperconnected World, There Is Only “good” “better” And “best.

Obviously China Is Clearly Taking The Lead In Some Areas, But When It Comes To The Most Advanced Innovation, It's Still America.

If You Don't Visit A Bad Neighborhood, It Might Visit You.

The Ideal Country In A Flat World Is The One With No Natural Resources, Because Countries With No Natural Resources Tend To Dig Inside Themselves. They Try To Tap The Energy, Entrepreneurship, Creativity, And Intelligence Of Their Own People-men And Women-rather Than Drill An Oil Well.

Pessimists Are Usually Right And Optimists Are Usually Wrong But All The Great Changes Have Been Accomplished By Optimists.

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What Is Al Qaeda? It's An Open Source Religious Political Movement That Works Off The Global Supply Chain.

Everything I’ve Ever Gotten In Life Is Largely Due To The Fact That I Was Born In This Country, America, At This Time With These Opportunities For Its Citizens. It Is The Primary Obligation Of Our Generation To Turn Over A Similar America To Our Kids.

Something Really Big Happened In The World's Wiring In The Last Decade, But It Was Obscured By The Financial Crisis And Post-9/11. We Went From A Connected World To A Hyperconnected World. I'm Always Struck That Facebook, Twitter, 4g, Iphones, Ipads, High-speech Broadband, Ubiquitous Wireless And Web-enabled Cellphones, The Cloud, Big Data, Cellphone Apps And Skype Did Not Exist Or Were In Their Infancy A Decade Ago.

Mcdonald's Cannot Flourish Without Mcdonnell Douglas, The Builder Of The F-15.

I Have A Daughter Who Is A Sophomore In College And Another Who Is In The 11th Grade Of High School.

I'm Pretty Much An Open Book. I Am A Fanatic Golfer And Golf Nut. If I Have Three Free Hours Any Day, My First Choice Is To Run To The Golf Course If The Weather Is Nice.

What We Have In The Bush Team Is A Faith-based Administration. It Launched A Faith-based War In Iraq, On The Basis Of Faith-based Intelligence, With A Faith-based Plan For Iraqi Reconstruction, Supported By Faith-based Tax Cuts To Generate Faith-based Revenues.

Why Is It Muslims From Pakistan Or From Egypt Come To America And Thrive, And They Are Frustrated Back Home? It's About Clean Government. It's About A Rule Of Law. It's About Intellectual Property Protection. They've Got All The Talent And Energy Of Anybody Else. As New Immigrants They May Have More Of It, So You Put Them In Our System And They Become Doctors, Lawyers, And Businessmen And Entrepreneurs.

America Is The Greatest Engine Of Innovation That Has Ever Existed, And It Can't Be Duplicated Anytime Soon, Because It Is The Product Of A Multitude Of Factors: Extreme Freedom Of Thought, An Emphasis On Independent Thinking, A Steady Immigration Of New Minds, A Risk-taking Culture With No Stigma Attached To Trying And Failing, A Noncorrupt Bureaucracy, And Financial Markets And A Venture Capital System That Are Unrivaled At Taking New Ideas And Turning Them Into Global Products.

I'm A Capitalist. I Believe In Capitalism. But Capitalism Only Works If You Have Safety Nets To Deal With People Who Are Naturally Left Behind And Brutalized By It.

A Golf Course Should Aspire To Generate As Much Energy As It Consumes - Golf Should Be Leading The Way Toward Energy Net Zero.

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We've Gone From Thinking The Fuels That Powered Our Growth Were Inexpensive, Inexhaustible And Benign To Understanding They Are Exhaustible, Expensive And Toxic. Once You Frame The Problem That Way, People Will Look At Solutions Differently.

You Really Do Have To Wonder Whether A Few Years From Now We’ll Look Back At The First Decade Of The 21st Century — When Food Prices Spiked, Energy Prices Soared, World Population Surged, Tornados Plowed Through Cities, Floods And Droughts Set Records, Populations Were Displaced And Governments Were Threatened By The Confluence Of It All — And Ask Ourselves: What Were We Thinking? How Did We Not Panic When The Evidence Was So Obvious That We’d Crossed Some Growth/climate/natural Resource/population Redlines All At Once?

Sometimes, When My Wife And I Were Going Out To Dinner, I Would Take My Laptop With Me And Work In The Car, So As To Take Advantage Of The Half Hour Going And Coming.

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The Financial Crisis Just Made The Hole Deeper, Which Is Why Our Stimulus Needs To Be Both Big And Smart, Both Financially And Educationally Stimulating. It Needs To Be Able To Produce Not Only More Shovel-ready Jobs And Shovel-ready Workers, But More Google-ready Jobs And Windows-ready And Knowledge-ready Workers.

When You Study History And Look At Every Civilization That Has Grown Up And Died Off, They All Leave One Remnant: A Major Sports Colosseum At The Heart Of Their Capital. Our Fate Can Be Different; But Only If We Start Doing Things Differently.

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Our President's Latest Energy Initiative Was To Go To Saudi Arabia And Beg King Abdullah To Give Us A Little Relief On Gasoline Prices. I Guess There Was Some Justice In That. When You, The President, After 9/11, Tell The Country To Go Shopping Instead Of Buckling Down To Break Our Addiction To Oil, It Ends With You, The President, Shopping The World For Discount Gasoline.

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I Attended Public School With The Same Group Of Kids From K Through 12.

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When You Lose Your Job, The Unemployment Rate Isn't Four Percent, It's 100 Percent.

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We Need To Become Energy Independent Or At Least Aspire To That.

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I Am Being Very Humble About The Arab Spring. There's Kind Of A Competition Out There, You Might Have Noticed, Of Who Can Be The First To Say The Arab Spring Is Going To Fail. Everyone Says, "i Told You So, I Told You So About The Muslim Brotherhood." I Have No Desire To Tell Anyone Anything. I Don't Know. I'm Just Listening, Watching. It May Turn Out All These People Are Right, They May Be Wrong. They May Be Right This Year And Wrong Next Year, By The Way. I'm Just Trying To Listen Day To Day, Figure It Out.

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Golf Has An Ambivalent Relationship With The Environment. On One Hand, It's A Great Preserver Of Open Spaces. Golf Doesn't Pave The World - It Helps To Green The World. But The Downside Is, It Uses A Lot Of Fertilizer, Pesticides And Water. And This Is In A World Where We Know That Synthetic Fertilizers And Pesticides Are Toxic, And Water Is More And More Scarce. Golf Could Do A Lot More.

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We Have To Be The Best Global Citizens We Can Be.

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Yes, The World Is Now Flat For Publishing As Well.

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It Is Hard To Partner With Someone When You Become So Radioactive No One Wants To Stand Next To You.

I Don't Think The Arab Spring Had Much To Do With Energy. I Think It Was Just The Opposite, In Fact. I Think The Arab Spring Happened Because Particularly Young People Knew They Were Living In A Context Where They Could Not Realize Their Full Potential, That They Are Being Kept Down By Their Own Governments.

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Desktop Freelancers And Innovative Startups All Over The World

The Great Thing About Cheap Natural Gas, Again It's Cheap, And It Provides A Cleaner Alternative To Coal. But It's Still A Fossil Fuel, And Because It's Still A Fossil Fuel, It Still Emits Carbon.

I Said That More People In More Places Can Now Compete, Connect And Collaborate With Equal Power And Equal Tools Than Ever Before.

The Unemployment Rate Today For People With Our-year College Degrees Is 4.1%, Which Is Almost None. That's People Switching Jobs Basically. That Tells You That Education Is The Only Way Up And The Only Way Out. If That Is The Fact, Then We've Got To Get More Of It For More People.

If You Are Self-motivated, Wow, This World Is Tailored For You. The Boundaries Are All Gone. But If You're Not Self-motivated, This World Will Be A Challenge Because The Walls, Ceilings And Floors That Protected People Are Also Disappearing. That Is What I Mean When I Say "it Is A 401(k) World." Government Will Do Less For You. Companies Will Do Less For You. Unions Can Do Less For You. There Will Be Fewer Limits, But Also Fewer Guarantees. Your Specific Contribution Will Define Your Specific Benefits Much More. Just Showing Up Will Not Cut It.

What Is The Most Entrepreneurial Country In The Middle East Today? It's Lebanon. Which Country Has No Oil Or Gas? Lebanon. The Same Was True Of Israel, The Same Was Of Bahrain. You Could See A Real Gradation. Turkey, For Instance: No Oil And Gas, Very Entrepreneurial. You Can Either Dig Your Future Out Of The Ground Or You Can Unlock The Potential Of Your People.

The Golden Straitjacket Is The Defining Political-economic Garment Of Globalization. [...] The Tighter You Wear It, The More Gold It Produces.

The Historical Debate Is Over. The Answer Is Free-market Capitalism.

If I Were Advising President Obama, Since He's The One Running, I Would Have Made His Campaign Very Simple. I Promise That In Four Years, I Will Get More Americans, As Many As I Possibly Can, The Opportunity And Access To Some Form Of Post-secondary Education. I Want More Of Them To Graduate High School With The Skill-set Of Post-secondary Education And I Want More Of Them To Be Able To Obtain That Post-secondary Education. This Is The Only Way We Are Going To Close The Income Gap.

The Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein Once Remarked That If You Ask A Man How Much Is Two Plus Two And He Tells You Five, That Is A Mistake. But If You Ask A Man How Much Is Two Plus Two And He Tells You Ninety-seven, That Is No Longer A Mistake. The Man You Are Talking To Is Operating With A Wholly Different Logic From Your Own.

I Was In Bangalore, India, The Silicon Valley Of India, When I Realized That The World Was Flat.

If You Followed This Economic Crisis And You Do Not Think That The World Is Getting Flatter, You Are Not Paying Attention. We Saw The Entire Global Economy At One Time Acting Totally In Sync. The Real Truth Is The World Is Even Flatter Than I Thought. Our Mortgage Crisis Is Killing Deutsche Bank. You Still Don't Think The World Is Flat?

My Mother-in-law Says If You Want To Live Like A Republican, Vote Like A Democrat. That If You Are A Part Of The Group That Is Doing Well In This System, You Owe It To Yourself And To Others To Look Out For Them And Make Sure You Are Always Building A Ladder For Others To Join You.

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Criticizing Israel Is Not Anti-semitic, And Saying So Is Vile. But Singling Out Israel For Opprobrium And International Sanction - Out Of All Proportion To Any Other Party In The Middle East - Is Anti-semitic, And Not Saying So Is Dishonest.

I Don't Think We Replaced The Soviet Union With Al Qaida. I Think We Replaced, We Should Have, Soviet Union With The Merger Of Globalization And The It Revolution. I Think It's That. That Is The Real Challenge That We Face Today. Unlike The Soviet Union, It Has No Face, It Has No Missiles, But It Is Something That Challenges Every Job, Every City And Every Community.

When You Can't Rely On Sticking A Pipe In The Ground, What You Have To Rely On Is Unlocking The Energy And Talent Of All Your People - Men And Women.

Even If America Tomorrow - And It Won't Happen Overnight - But If We Did Reduce Our Demand For Gas And Natural Gas And Crude Oil By A Significant Degree, That Does Have An Exponential Effect On Producers In The Middle East, Everything Else Being Equal. But If China's Demand Is Growing And India's Demand Is Growing, They Are Not Going Back.

A 2011 Report Produced By Forrester Research Estimated That The Revenue Generated Through The Sales Of Smartphone And Tablet Applications Will Reach $38 Billion Annually By 2015. Think About That: An Industry That Did Not Exist In 2006 Will Be Generating $38 Billion In Revenues Within A Decade. . . .

Once People Get A Taste For Whatever You Want To Call It - Economic Independence, A Better Lifestyle, And A Better Life For Their Children - They Grab On To That And Don't Want To Give It Up.

I Think We Have Lost Our Groove As A Country. One Of The Reasons Was The Attack On 9/11. We Got Knocked Off Our Game. From A Country That Always Exported Hope We Went Into The Business Of Exporting Fear.

If You Want To Get An Advance Machine Tool Job Today, You Need To Know Calculus. We Know A Lot Of People Don't, We Can't Expect Everyone To Know Calculus, What Do We Do? We Created A Huge Bubble That Created A Huge Number Of Jobs To Build Houses And To Be In Retail. You Don't Have To Have A Lot Of Skills To Work In The New Gap Store That Opened, At The Latest Starbucks Branch, Or To Hammer A Nail For A New House.

The Thing You Have To Remember Is, Oil And Gas Are Commodities, And The More We Use Them The More The Price Goes Up, Like Any Commodity. Solar, Wind - They Are Technologies, So The More You Use Them, The More The Price Goes Down.

There Is Definitely Global Warming, And Man Is Definitely Contributing To It. Go Out To, Say, Montana And Talk To Some Pretty Conservative People, Hunters And Fishermen. They Know That In The Trout Stream They Fished When They Were Growing Up, The Trout Are Stressed Because The Water Temperature Is Going Up. They Know The Hunting Season Has Been Delayed Because The Snows Are Coming Later, And Therefore The Elk Aren't Coming Down From The Mountains.

Syria Is On The Back End Of Basically A Decade-long Drought. Over The Last Decade, Farmers And Herders Have Been Ravaged In Syria Forcing Them To Give Up And Move To Urban Areas. This Has Put A Huge Strain On Urban Resources, And It's Surely One Of The Reasons For The Uprising There.

By 'flat' I Did Not Mean That The World Is Getting Equal. I Said That More People In More Places Can Now Compete, Connect And Collaborate With Equal Power And Equal Tools Than Ever Before. That's Why An Indian In Bangalore Can Take Care Of The Office Work Of American Doctors Or Read The X-rays Of German Hospitals.

I Firmly Believe That The Next Great Breakthrough In Bioscience Could Come From A 15-year-old Who Downloads The Human Genome In Egypt.

There Is Something More Severe Than The Problem With Thomas Friedman, Which Can Be Generalized To Represent Someone Causing Action While Being Completely Unaccountable For His Words.

Rock Stars Get Room Keys, I Get Business Cards. Wherever I Go I Meet Innovators Of Wind Power Equipment, Solar Energy Operators.

Supply Chains Cannot Tolerate Even 24 Hours Of Disruption. So If You Lose Your Place In The Supply Chain Because Of Wild Behavior You Could Lose A Lot. It Would Be Like Pouring Cement Down One Of Your Oil Wells.

What Every Employer Is Looking For Is Not Someone Who Can Do The Job, But Someone Who Can Reinvent The Job.

America Is Interested In Change And Reform In The Middle East But In A Stable Way.

The Dell Theory Of Conflict Prevention Argues That No Two Countries That Are Both Part Of The Same Global Supply Chain Will Ever Fight A War As Long As They Are Each Part Of That Supply Chain.

The Arab Awakening Has Been, Up To Now, A Lot About Freedom From Dictatorial Regimes - Syria, Yemen, Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain And Egypt. But Once You Got Freedom From, Then You Need Freedom To. Freedom From Is About Destroying Things. Freedom To Is About Constructing Things, Constructing The Rule Of Law.

I've Always Believed The World Would Be A Better Place If More People Everywhere Have A Chance To Shape Their Own Future And Realize Their Full Potential. I Think That Is What Life Is About.

Most Jobs Are Outsourced To The Past, They Aren't Outsourced To India Or Mexico Or Pakistan Or Anywhere Else.

All One Needs To Do Is Just To Go To Any Hospital In America And See The Number Of Pakistani Or Indian Or Lebanese, Or Syrian, Or Egyptian Doctors, Who Are Either First Generation Or Themselves Immigrants, To Know, And I'm A Big Believer - Brains Are Distributed Evenly Around The World. What Aren't Distributed Evenly Are Opportunities, Stable Government, Educational Institutions, Etc.

It's Easy To Kind Of Say It's The Elite That's Putting You Down. Well, It Wasn't Really The Elite, Technology Will Do That.

Communism Was A Great System For Making People Equally Poor - In Fact, There Was No Better System In The World For That Than Communism. Capitalism Made People Unequally Rich.

A Vision Without Resources Is An Hallucination.

To Me The Smart Thing That Governments In The Middle East Would Be Doing Right Now Is Taking Their Oil And Gas Fountain - And The Smartest Ones Are To Some Degree - And Making Sure They're Investing In Their People To Unlock Their Potential - Men And Women.

Geopolitics Is All About Leverage. We Cannot Make Ourselves Safer Abroad Unless We Change Our Behavior At Home.

What I Want Is Natural Gas To Be A Bridge To A Cleaner Energy Future, Not A Dam Against A Cleaner Energy Future, Not A Dead End. To Get This Right, To Get The Most Out Of It, We Not Only Have To Make Sure We Exploit Natural Gas In A Clean Way - It's A Challenge - But We Also Have To Make Sure That We Are Instilling And Implementing All The Incentives To Win Solar, Nuclear Energy Efficiency That Will Make Them Continually Competitive With Natural Gas In The Future.

The First Rule Of Holes Is When You're In One, Stop Digging. When You're In Three, Bring A Lot Of Shovels.

If E-mail Had Been Around Before The Telephone Was Invented, People Would Have Said, 'hey, Forget E-mail! With This New Telephone Invention I Can Actually Talk To People!'.

Service Culture

I'm From Minnesota. I'm Optimistic. I Mean, That's Just Who I Am.

When People Get Frustrated, It's When They Feel They Are Living In A Context That Deprives Them Of Dignity, Deprives Them Of Justice And Deprives Them Of The Freedom To Realize Their Full Potential, And That To Me Is What The Arab Awakening Was All About. I Think It Applied To Every Country, And So I Have Been An Unmitigated Supporter Of It.

If You Don't Have An Ethic Of Conservation, You Basically Have A License To Drive A Hummer Through The Amazon.

You Take One Bomber And Deploy Him In Baghdad, And Another Is Manufactured In Riyadh The Next Day. It's Exactly Like When You Take The Toy Off The Shelf At Wal-mart And Another Is Made In Shen Zhen The Next Day.

We Are Led By Lawyers Who Do Not Understand Either Technology Or Balance Sheets.

Big Breakthroughs Happen When What Is Suddenly Possible Meets What Is Desperately Needed

I Would Say That In 2000, We Understand As Much About How Today's System Of Globalization Is Going To Work As We Understood About How The Cold War System Was Going To Work In 1946.

In A Hyper-connected World Where Average Is Over, There Is One Thing We Know Absolutely For Sure: Every Good Job Will Require More Education.

What About The Rest Of Life? Respect For The Sanctity Of Life, If You Believe That It Begins At Conception, Cannot End At Birth.

I Have No Problem With A War For Oil-if We Accompany It With A Real Program For Energy Conservation. But When We Tell The World We Couldn't Care Less About Climate Change, That We Feel Entitled To Drive Whatever Big Cars We Feel Like, That We Feel Entitled To Consume However Much Oil We Like, The Message We Send Is That A War For Oil In The Gulf Is Not A War To Protect The World's Right To Economic Survival-but Our Right To Indulge. Now That Will Be Seen As Immoral.

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