Quotes from Thomas Friedman

Capitalism and political systems - like companies - must constantly evolve to stay vital.

We need better neighbors, neighbors that care about the schools in their neighborhood whether they have kids in them or not, because they know that the health and vitality of that neighborhood depends on it.

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.

Al Qaeda is nothing more than a mutant supply chain. They're playing off the same platform as Wal-Mart and Dell. They're just not restrained by it. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.

There's a difference between being able to make long distance phone calls cheaper on the Internet and walking around Riyadh with a PDA where you can have all of Google in your pocket. It's a difference in degree that's so enormous it becomes a difference in kind.

Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of taxpayers' money into the mail-order catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay.

I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college and another who is in the 11th grade of high school.

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

Change your leaders, not your light bulbs.

Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

I said that more people in more places can now compete, connect and collaborate with equal power and equal tools than ever before.

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.

If we don't have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages...change.

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.

Geopolitics is all about leverage. We cannot make ourselves safer abroad unless we change our behavior at home.

Remember, in China when you are one in a million, there are 1,300 other people just like you.

No matter where I go - London, Beirut, Jerusalem, Washington, Beijing, or Bangalore - I'm always looking to rediscover that land of ten thousand lakes where politics actually worked to make people's lives better, not pull them apart.

If you don't have an ethic of conservation, you basically have a license to drive a Hummer through the Amazon.

Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. Wherever I go I meet innovators of wind power equipment, solar energy operators.

The country that owns green, that dominates that industry, is going to have the most energy security, national security, economic security, competitive companies, healthy population and, most of all, global respect.

I can see a day soon where you'll create your own college degree by taking the best online courses from the best professors from around the world - some computing from Stanford, some entrepreneurship from Wharton, some ethics from Brandeis, some literature from Edinburgh - paying only the nominal fee for the certificates of completion.

What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.

We are led by lawyers who do not understand either technology or balance sheets.