Quotes by Thomas Friedman

“Reading Europe's press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush's formulation that an axis of evil threatens world peace. There's only one small problem. Pr...”

“You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept. The concept I'd argue for is neoliberalism. More Americans today are natura...”

“We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going hou...”

“Now we've entered Globalization 3.0, and it is shrinking the world from size small to a size tiny.”

“I was speaking out in Minnesota—my hometown, in fact—and a guy stood up in the audience, said, Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose? I said, No, absolutely not. I said, You ...”

“The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose...”

“The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed.”

“Israel should really reflect on what's going on in Egypt. It does not want to be the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process.”

“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 pl...”

“What Biden is trying to achieve is equivalent of having a Rubic's cube and trying to align all the colors on the same side”

“The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time.”

“What I absolutely don't understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of—I know a lot of these guys—reasonably decent people and more than r...”

“What we're gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war.”

“Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile.”

“That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should st...”

“I think we're in the end-game now…. I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt, I think, the next congressional election—that's...”

“The only thing I am certain of is that in the wake of this election, Iraq will be what Iraqis make of it—and the next six months will tell us a lot. I remain guardedly hopeful.”

“We've teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it's going to co...”

“We're at the beginning of, I think, the decisive, I would say, six months in Iraq, OK, because I feel like this election—you know, I felt from the beginning Iraq was going to be ultimately, Charlie...”