Quotes from George Friedman

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Franklin was an iconoclast, and perhaps best represented the American spirit. He was a serious man. He was not a sober one. Franklin was a party of one and represented the people who loved the country, but he understood that decency required humor.

At the end of the war American and Soviet troops massed throughout most of the European peninsula, with Americans also in Britain and the British in Europe. The peninsula was occupied, shattered and exhausted, no longer the arbiter of its own fate.

technology and happiness are intimately linked in American life, to the point that technology is at times a substitute for other types of happiness, such as love and the divine. Americans value those things, but they love cutting-edge technology with a different but real passion.

The European peninsula was occupied by the United States and the Soviet Union, its sovereignty compromised. Over the next decades its empire would disintegrate and its global power disappear.

It would be interesting to imagine the outcome if all Indians had cooperated and rallied against the Europeans. But that was impossible. The continent was vast and the Indians knew the place where they lived and the immediate neighboring nations, but they did not know places far away. They did not all speak the same language or worship the same gods. And like people everywhere, they feared each other more than they feared the new stranger.

In 711 Muslim armies went north into Spain, ultimately occupying it and crossing the Pyrenees into France. In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place.

There is a fierce unity to America, and simultaneously there are deep differences that turn into mutual contempt at times of stress. This tension actually has a virtue hidden within it. The tension within the country, the radical differences in culture and outlook, actually become a goad driving the country forward but leaving some behind.

Morality starts as a simple concept and becomes complicated.

It is hardest to write on the Holocaust. It had no military purpose. While everything else Hitler did could, with some strain, be fitted with some military logic, the industrialized killing of 6 million Jews and millions of others could not be. A place like Auschwitz did nothing to help with the war effort and used up massive resources, if not for food for the inmates, then for manpower, trains, and the rest. But

At the end and beginning of each cycle, there is the sense of failure and disaster. Yet each time the United States has re-created itself, perhaps imperfectly, but with a rebirth of startling superiority.

It mattered a great deal who occupied your country. The

At the height of the British Empire, Lord Palmerston said, "It is a narrow policy to suppose that this country or that is to be marked out as the eternal ally or the perpetual enemy of England. We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.

Machiavelli wrote, "The main foundations of every state, new states as well as ancient or composite ones, are good laws and good arms. You cannot have good laws without good arms, and where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow." This is a better definition of realism than the realists have given us.

Terrorism derives from weakness, focusing on the psyche in order to make the terrorist appear more powerful than he is. The terrorist's goal is to be treated as a significant threat when in fact he isn't one.

A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.

Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century.

In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. It

There is a saying attributed to him that helps explain his thinking: "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

The United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.

There is obviously a level in which humans make their own choices, but as Adam Smith pointed out, all those individual choices lead to a predictable nation.

Japan will need to foster deep

The United States has little reason to build an empire for economic and trade purposes. It exports only 13 percent of its GDP to the world, compared with Germany, which exports almost 50 percent, or China's exports in excess of 20 percent of GDP.

The nation provided a human with the things that are most human—language and a past that stretched back before his birth.