84 Quotes by George Friedman

Their job as leader was not to solve the problem – the president really has little control over the economy – but to convince the public not only that he has a plan but that he is altogether confident in the plan's success and that only a cynic or someone in different to the public's well-being would dare to question him on the details.

A century is about events. A decade is about people.

... common sense is the one thing that will certainly be wrong.

The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. In so doing, it seduces people into thinking that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we know and intended by reason.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

Wars are times of intense technological transformation, because societies invest – sometimes with extensive borrowing – when and where matters of life and death are at stake.

Building a naval power takes generations, not so much to develop the necessary technology as to pass along the accumulated experience that creates good admirals.

The idea that the president has the power to craft a new strategy both overstates his power and understates the power of reality crafted by those who came before him. We are all trapped in circumstances into which we were born and choices that were made for us.

If the cost of naming the enemy is diplomatically or politically unacceptable, then the war is not likely to go well.