108 Quotes by Thomas L. Friedman

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.

It is so easy to demonize free-market and the freedom to outsource and offshore because it is so much easier to see people being laid off in big bunches, which makes headlines, than to see them being hired in fives and tens by small and medium-sized companies, which rarely makes news.

It is always dangerous to declare a turning point in history. We always tend to feel that, when we are alive, something really major is happening.

Goods are traded, but services are consumed and produced in the same place. And you cannot export a haircut. But we are coming close to exporting a haircut, the appointment part. What kind of haircut do you want? Which barber do you want? All those things can and will be done by a call center far away.

… “Education is a process, not a place.” Education can and must go on everywhere all the time-in schools, offices, at home, online, in the classroom, over your iPod…

People will change their habits quickly IF they have a strong reason for doing so.

How youMore people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself.

A Nobel Prize winner was asked how he became a scientist. He said that every day after school, his mother would ask him not what he learned but whether he asked a good question today. That, he said, was how he became a scientist.

You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.