Common good Quote by Thomas L. Friedman

““My time in the Middle East led me to realize that, with a few rare exceptions, the dominant political ideology there—whether you were talking about Sunnis or Shiites or Kurds, Israelis, Arabs, Persians, Turks, or Palestinians—was “I am weak, how can I compromise? I am strong, why should I compromise?” The notion of there being “a common good” and “a middle ground” that we all compromise for and upon—not to mention a higher community calling we work to sustain—was simply not in the lexicon.””

Thomas L. Friedman

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“When my dad died suddenly, my widowed mom couldn’t afford my college tuition, so Morrie and his friend Jake Garber, my dad’s boss, and my aunt and uncle, all pitched in. Morrie was the driving force behind it all, though. I did not come to him for help. He just came to me one day and said, “You can’t afford…

Thomas L. Friedman

“These alliances began with the most basic blood association—the family—and then expanded to the clan, the tribe, and then to other tribes.”

Thomas L. Friedman

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“Social conservatives from the right wing of the Republican party, who do not like globalization or closer integration with the world because it brings too many foreigners and foreign cultural mores into America, might align themselves with unions from the left wing of the Democratic Party, who don't like globalization for the way it facilitates the outsourcing and offshoring of…

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“When Muslim radicals and fundamentalists look at the West, they see only the openness that makes us, in their eyes, decadent and promiscuous. They see only the openness that has produced Britney Spears and Janet Jackson. They do not see, and do not want to see, the openness - the freedom of thought and inquiry - that has made us…

Thomas L. Friedman

“Men grant and withdraw their love according to their whims, but fear is a hand that rests on their shoulders in a way they…

Thomas L. Friedman

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“But the question that tugged at me, and I asked over and over was: What was that “it” that was being sustained? I needed to know because I wanted to bottle “it” and share “it.” Nothing, it seemed to me, would be more useful in this age of accelerations. Having returned home to reconstruct what had worked in the past…

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“It is fun to be around really, really creative makers in the second half of the chessboard, to see what they can do, as individuals, with all of the empowering tools that have been enabled by the supernova. I met Tom Wujec in San Francisco at an event at the Exploratorium. We thought we had a lot in common and…

Thomas L. Friedman

“Today more than ever, the traditional boundaries between politics, culture, technology, finance, national security and ecology are disappearing. You often cannot explain one without…

Thomas L. Friedman

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“Second, in the desert there was no outside mediator or government to enforce laws or to adjudicate disputes in a neutral way between tribes…

Thomas L. Friedman

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“NAZ was founded in 2008 in Minneapolis, and is modeled on Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone. It uses a holistic web of family coaches…

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“I got to see with my own eyes the boundaries of men’s compassion alongside their unfathomable brutality, their ingenuity alongside astounding folly, their insanity…

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“While their parents knew a different life and would never really feel at home again without it, their kids had never known anything else…

Thomas L. Friedman

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Explore all 63 Thomas L. Friedman quotes

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People who reject transcendent authority can no longer persuade one another through rational arguments; everything is reduced to personal opinion. Debates about ideas thus…

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