Friedman Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Friedman. Here they are! All 200 of them:

My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover. ~ Falsely yours
Kinky Friedman
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
Pierre Dos Utt (Tanstaafl: A Plan for a New Economic World Order)
A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.
Milton Friedman
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
Milton Friedman
Pessimists are usually right and optimists are usually wrong but all the great changes have been accomplished by optimists.
Thomas L. Friedman
Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
Milton Friedman
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Milton Friedman
I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible.
Milton Friedman
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
Milton Friedman
Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Milton Friedman
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.
Thomas L. Friedman
See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That's literally true.
Milton Friedman
Society doesn't have values. People have values.
Milton Friedman
The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both
Milton Friedman
Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government-- in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.
Milton Friedman
I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about; I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people—Americans and Europeans—come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on.
Henry Rollins
Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government.
Milton Friedman
Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman’s misfortune is that his economic policies have been tried.
John Kenneth Galbraith
A slut is someone, usually a woman, who’s stepped outside of the very narrow lane that good girls are supposed to stay within. Sluts are loud. We’re messy. We don’t behave. In fact, the original definition of “slut” meant “untidy woman.” But since we live in a world that relies on women to be tidy in all ways, to be quiet and obedient and agreeable and available (but never aggressive), those of us who color outside of the lines get called sluts. And that word is meant to keep us in line.
Jaclyn Friedman
I support gay marriage. I believe they have a right to be as miserable as the rest of us.
Kinky Friedman
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons
Milton Friedman
The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.
Milton Friedman
I always knew there was no one who is going to accept my flaws and understand my brokenness.And i knew it very well that nobody would hold my hand when the wind of darkness overcome my life so i just pushed them,i pushed them all away.
Carl W. Bazil
He moves fastest who moves alone.
Milton Friedman
Now I have a cat. Well, that's not quite accurate. A cat and I have each other.
Kinky Friedman
You don't accomplish much by swimming with the mainstream. Hell, a dead fish can do that.
Kinky Friedman
Summer-induced stupidity. That was the diagnosis...
Aimee Friedman (Sea Change)
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it ... gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman
Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.
Milton Friedman
Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative -- the building blocks of success throughout our society.
Milton Friedman
There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud
Milton Friedman
It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.
Aimee Friedman (Sea Change)
Claire: Dear Claire, "What" and "If" are two words as non-threatening as words can be. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: What if? What if? What if? I don't know how your story ended but if what you felt then was true love, then it's never too late. If it was true then, why wouldn't it be true now? You need only the courage to follow your heart. I don't know what a love like Juliet's feels like - love to leave loved ones for, love to cross oceans for but I'd like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I will have the courage to seize it. And, Claire, if you didn't, I hope one day that you will. All my love, Juliet
Lise Friedman (Letters to Juliet: Celebrating Shakespeare's Greatest Heroine, the Magical City of Verona, and the Power of Love)
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.
Thomas L. Friedman
When people went on vacation, they shed their home skins, thought they could be a new person.
Aimee Friedman (Sea Change)
For all the harmless innocence conjured by the word "library", the Friedmans knew the truth: a library, properly maintained, could save the world - or burn it down.
Jason Fagone (The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies)
No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's
Thomas L. Friedman
Life is the messy bits.
Lise Friedman (Letters to Juliet: Celebrating Shakespeare's Greatest Heroine, the Magical City of Verona, and the Power of Love)
I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant (Gerald Tarrant).
C.S. Friedman (When True Night Falls (The Coldfire Trilogy, #2))
In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears-and that is our problem.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you better start running.
Thomas L. Friedman
I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.
Milton Friedman
Communism was a great system for making people equally poor - in fact, there was no better system in the world for that than communism. Capitalism made people unequally rich.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
If you have the choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There's always time to be humble later, once you've been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong.
Kinky Friedman
Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn't really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn't just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can't really afford to eliminate it - not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend.
Milton Friedman (There's No Such Thing As a Free Lunch)
The key insight of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.
Milton Friedman
Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.
Milton Friedman
I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R'. And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.
Milton Friedman
The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
In my world, you don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and be against common-sense gun control — like banning public access to the kind of semiautomatic assault rifle, designed for warfare, that was used recently in a Colorado theater. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and want to shut down the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures clean air and clean water, prevents childhood asthma, preserves biodiversity and combats climate change that could disrupt every life on the planet. You don’t get to call yourself “pro-life” and oppose programs like Head Start that provide basic education, health and nutrition for the most disadvantaged children...The term “pro-life” should be a shorthand for respect for the sanctity of life. But I will not let that label apply to people for whom sanctity for life begins at conception and ends at birth. What about the rest of life? Respect for the sanctity of life, if you believe that it begins at conception, cannot end at birth.
Thomas L. Friedman
The ideal country in a flat world is the one with no natural resources, because countries with no natural resources tend to dig inside themselves. They try to tap the energy, entrepreneurship, creativity, and intelligence of their own people-men and women-rather than drill an oil well.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
The saying in China is "If you're one in a million, there's still 1,300 people just like you.
Thomas L. Friedman
If you're lookin' for a helpin' hand, try the one at the end of your arm.
Kinky Friedman
We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis.
Milton Friedman
I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.
Milton Friedman
I don't care what people say about how I look or even their opinion on my relationship. But the moment you judge my character is when we have a problem.
Rachelle Friedman
...Promises are more dangerous then secrets.
Aimee Friedman
Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.
Kinky Friedman
In Geo-Politics, a nation has no permanent allies or permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
George Friedman
Well, I hate to be the one to take the flyswatter to Tinker Bell, but...
Kinky Friedman
May the God of your choice bless you.
Kinky Friedman
It has always been my view that terrorism is not spawned by the poverty of money; it is spawned by the poverty of dignity. Humiliation is the most underestimated force in international relations and in human relations. It is when people or nations are humiliated that they really lash out and engage in extreme violence.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
Of course all such conclusions about appropriate actions against the rich and powerful are based on a fundamental flaw: This is us, and that is them. This crucial principle, deeply embedded in Western culture, suffices to undermine even the most precise analogy and the most impeccable reasoning.
Noam Chomsky (Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians)
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.
George Friedman (The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century)
Almost all the students who make it to Caltech, one of the best scientific universities in the world, come from public schools. So it can be done.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.
Milton Friedman
I think that the Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of government.
Milton Friedman
It's like the old question, "Do you lock your house to keep people out, or to protect what's inside?" Should a person act modestly and dress modestly in order to prevent intrusion from the outside, undesirable things from happening, or to preserve and maintain what is inside: the delicate and sensitive ability to have and maintain an intimate relationship.
Manis Friedman (Doesn't Anyone Blush Anymore: Love, Marriage and the Art of Intimacy)
Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does.
C.S. Friedman (In Conquest Born (In Conquest Born, #1))
Big breakthroughs happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately needed
Thomas L. Friedman
Marketing is not what lures a writer to this pursuit. Marketing is the adversary that arrives smuggled inside the Trojan Horse of one’s creative impulse.
Jane Friedman
Anybody who was easily converted was not worth converting.
Milton Friedman
When unions get higher wages for their members by restricting entry into an occupation, those higher wages are at the expense of other workers who find their opportunities reduced. When government pays its employees higher wages, those higher wages are at the expense of the taxpayer. But when workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firm competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody's expense. They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger - there's more for the worker, but there's also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer, and even the tax collector. That's the way the free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. That's the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.
Milton Friedman
When we try to understand something, more often than not, we kill it, and now I can feel the dangers of this encroaching on me: cynicism, bitterness, and infinite sadness...It's impossible to live if you're too aware, too thoughtful. Take nature for example: everything that lives happily and too a ripe old age is not very intelligent. Tortoises live for centuries, water's immortal, and Milton Friedman's still alive.
Martin Page (How I Became Stupid)
No matter what your profession – doctor, lawyer, architect, accountant – if you are an American, you better be good at the touchy-feely service stuff, because anything that can be digitized can be outsourced to either the smartest or the cheapest producer.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.
Sonya Friedman
I'm going to lower the drinking age to eighteen. If you're old enough to die in Iraq, you're old enough to drink.
Kinky Friedman
Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
By not asking too much, you can believe in almost anything..like..a starry night in the mountains, or even the existence of fate.
Aimee Friedman
today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
The Romulans may rip this base in half, pal. They may even kill me. But I'll be damned if they're going to keep me from enjoying a refreshing beverage.
Michael Jan Friedman (Starfleet Year One (Star Trek))
Come find me," Leo put in, his gaze full of understanding. "Whenever you want. I'll be here.
Aimee Friedman (Sea Change)
.'Deserves' is an impossible thing to decide. No one deserves anything. Thank God we don't get what we deserve.
Milton Friedman
Tom Friedman says China is so awesome they make kosher pigs.
Jonah Goldberg
For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number--for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs--jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
Some would ask what country am I from? We ara supposed to tell the truth, [so] we tell them India. Some thought it was Indiana, not India! Some did not know where India is. I said the country next to Pakistan.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes "on suspicion" can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.
Milton Friedman
Ed Friedman: [talking about Patti Smith] One time she told me, "Allen Ginsberg thought I was a cute boy and he tried to pick me up, so I said, "LOOK AT THE TITS, ALLEN! NOTICE THE TITS!
Legs McNeil (Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk)
Part of freedom is the right of each of us to go to hell in his own fashion.
David D. Friedman (The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism)
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
The principal factor promoting historically significant social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
At the end of the day, no amount of investing, no amount of clean electrons, no amount of energy efficiency will save the natural world if we are not paying attention to it - if we are not paying attention to all the things that nature give us for free: clean air, clean water, breathtaking vistas, mountains for skiing, rivers for fishing, oceans for sailing, sunsets for poets, and landscapes for painters. What good is it to have wind-powered lights to brighten the night if you can't see anything green during the day? Just because we can't sell shares in nature doesn't mean it has no value.
Thomas L. Friedman (Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America)
Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?
David D. Friedman
Tomorrow could not get better if one failed to survive today.
C.S. Friedman (Feast of Souls (The Magister Trilogy, #1))
In the hyperconnected world, there is only “good” “better” and “best,
Thomas L. Friedman
The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations.
David M. Friedman
Politics is the only field of human endeavor where the more experience you have, the worse you get.
Kinky Friedman
No policy is sustainable without a public that broadly understands why it's necessary and sees the world the way you do...
Thomas L. Friedman (The Lexus and the Olive Tree)
There's a fine line between fiction and non-fiction and I think I snorted it somewhere in 1979
Kinky Friedman (The Mile High Club (Kinky Friedman, #13))
The power to do good is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm.
Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it's jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels. [Reply to the government bureaucrat of one Asian country who told him that, reason why there were workers with shovels instead of modern tractors and earth movers at a worksite of a new canal, was that: "You don't understand. This is a jobs program."]
Milton Friedman
In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic "what your country can do for you" implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man's belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, "what you can do for your country" implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.
Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
When you study history and look at every civilization that has grown up and died off, they all leave one remnant: a major sports colosseum at the heart of their capital. Our fate can be different; but only if we start doing things differently.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both. —Louis Brandeis
Thomas L. Friedman
No athlete, no scientist, no musician ever got better without focused practice, and there is no program you can download for that. It has to come from within.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
Men grant and withdraw their love according to their whims, but fear is a hand that rests on their shoulders in a way they can never shake.
Thomas L. Friedman (From Beirut to Jerusalem)
The scientific name for an animal that doesn’t either run from or fight its own enemies is lunch.
Michael Jan Friedman
A society that puts equality — in the sense of equality of outcome — ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.
Milton Friedman
Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? . . . And just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us.
Milton Friedman
The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn't do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn't do a thing for them.
Milton Friedman
But the most dangerous thing in the world in the world is to run the risk of waking up one morning and realizing suddenly that all this time you've been living without really and truly living and by then it's too late. When you wake up to that kind of realization, it's too late for wishes and regrets. It's even too late to dream.
Kinky Friedman (Kill Two Birds and Get Stoned)
What is a child?" he asks her. The diamond gaze does not flinch. "Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children." She paused. "Adults sell themselves.
C.S. Friedman (Feast of Souls (The Magister Trilogy, #1))
I watched the land for as long as I could, until it disappeared behind its shawl of mist, and until I had it fixed in my mind - unchanged, mysterious and beautiful
Aimee Friedman (Sea Change)
Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.
Richard Elliott Friedman
Not all 'schooling' is 'education,' and not all 'education' is 'schooling'.
Milton Friedman
Inflation is taxation without representation.
Milton Friedman
Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.
Milton Friedman
So what am I? I guess I would call myself a sober optimist...If you are not sober about the scale of the challenge, then you are not paying attention. But if you are not an optimist, you have no chance of generating the kind of mass movement needed to achieve the needed scale.
Thomas L. Friedman (Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution – and How It Can Renew America)
With respect to teachers' salaries .... Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.
Milton Friedman
The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the "rule of the game" and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.
Milton Friedman
The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors. They all need to go on safari together.
Thomas L. Friedman (Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution--and How It Can Renew America)
ان الشخص الوحيد الذي يمكنه اقناعك حقاً هو نفسك,عليك ان تدير الامور في رأسك اثناء استرخائك,ثم عليك ان تدرس الاراء الكثيرة المخالفة,دع الافكار تختمر في ذهنك,وبعد مدة طويلة حول تفضيلاتك إلى قناعات
Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. Communication does not depend on syntax, or eloquence, or rhetoric, or articulation but on the emotional context in which the message is being heard. People can only hear you when they are moving toward you, and they are not likely to when your words are pursuing them. Even the choicest words lose their power when they are used to overpower. Attitudes are the real figures of speech.
Edwin H. Friedman
Social media is great for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building. Good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
Every time you see a beautiful woman, just remember, somebody else got tired of her shit
Kinky Friedman (When the Cat's Away (Kinky Friedman, #3))
More Miracles occur from Gratitude and Forgiveness than anything else
Philip H. Friedman (The Forgiveness Solution: The Whole-Body RX for Finding True Happiness, Abundant Love, and Inner Peace)
There's this magical sense of possibility that stretches like a bridge between June and August. A sense that anything can happen.
Aimee Friedman (Two Summers)
Believers in aristocracy and socialism share a faith in centralized rule, in rule by command rather than by voluntary cooperation.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
Happiness is a moving target.
Kinky Friedman (Cowboy Logic: The Wit and Wisdom of Kinky Friedman (and Some of His Friends))
The best fiction is true.
Kinky Friedman
I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.
Milton Friedman
Always respect your superiors, if you have any.
Kinky Friedman
A fool and his money are soon elected
Kinky Friedman
It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine. " Only a crisis-actual or percieved-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.
Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism)
Friday night was the night most people thought they were supposed to have fun. Trouble was most people didn't know what fun was or how to have it, so things usually ended up pretty ugly.
Kinky Friedman (A Case of Lone Star (Kinky Friedman, #2))
The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.
Paul Krugman
We go to school for twelve or more years during our childhoods and early adulthoods, and then we’re done. But when the pace of change gets this fast, the only way to retain a lifelong working capacity is to engage in lifelong learning.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups.
Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.
Milton Friedman
Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless.
Milton Friedman
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.
Milton Friedman (Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History)
Remember: Y'all is singular. All y'all is plural. All y'all's is plural possessive.
Kinky Friedman
I was so high, I needed a stepladder to scratch my own ass.
Kinky Friedman
With some notable exceptions, businessmen favor free enterprise in general but are opposed to it when it comes to themselves.
Milton Friedman
Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
Everything I’ve ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids.
Thomas L. Friedman
... unfools of unbeing ... means quite clearly people who are too stereotyped to be eccentric – people who are too dead spiritually to exist at all and who call alive individual fools
Norman Friedman (E.E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry)
The colossal misunderstanding of our time is the assumption that insight will work with people who are unmotivated to change. If you want your child, spouse, client, or boss to shape up, stay connected while changing yourself rather than trying to fix them.
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
It has been my impression that at any gathering, whether it be public or private, those who are quickest to inject words like sensitivity, empathy, consensus, trust, confidentiality, and togetherness into their arguments have perverted these humanitarian words into power tools to get others to adapt to them.
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
There is no such thing as redemption, my friend. There is right, there is wrong, and there are a million shades of color between the two. Once you've done wrong, it is always with you. You just have to try and be better.
C.S. Friedman (Black Sun Rising (The Coldfire Trilogy, #1))
Though the 'Thou' is not an 'It', it is also not "another 'I'". He who treats a person as "another 'I'" does not really see that person but only a projected image of himself. Such a relation, despite the warmest "personal" feeling is really 'I'-'It'.
Mauric Friedman (Martin Buber)
When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. “You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
History only suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.
Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me..Phil 3:14
Aileen Friedman (Changes From a Sunset)
Our emotions can be either corrupted or elevated. Human love was not created to be without premeditated purpose.
Manis Friedman (Doesn't Anyone Blush Anymore: Love, Marriage and the Art of Intimacy)
The smaller the unit of government and the more restricted the functions assigned government, the less likely it is that its actions will reflect special interests rather than the general interest.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
I imagine the people whose lives are most intertwined with mine, and I realize life has gone on without me. The planet has not imploded because I, the girl who has always done what is expected of her, decided not to, just this once.
Rachel Friedman (The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure)
One of the newest figures to emerge on the world stage in recent years is the social entrepreneur. This is usually someone who burns with desire to make a positive social impact on the world, but believes that the best way of doing it is, as the saying goes, not by giving poor people a fish and feeding them for a day, but by teaching them to fish, in hopes of feeding them for a lifetime. I have come to know several social entrepreneurs in recent years, and most combine a business school brain with a social worker's heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching some very innovative projects.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
The woman recovering from abuse or other stressful life situations may feel she's in no way in charge of anything, least of all her own world. She faces the horse with trepidation. The horse senses the fear and becomes tense and concerned. The wise instructor starts small. The woman is handed a soft brush and sent to fuss over the horse. It's pointed out that if she stands close to the animal, she will be out of range of a well-aimed kick. She is warned to watch for tell-tale signs of fear in herself and the horse. She's warned to keep her feet out from under the horse's stomping hoof. They're both allowed to back away and regroup and try again until they reach an accord regarding personal space. Calm prevails, and within a few minutes, hours or sessions, interaction becomes friendship. It happens almost every time a woman is allowed enough time and space to work through the situation. So a woman whose daily life is overwhelming her learns to step back. Is this a cure for her endless problems? Of course not. Simple is not simplistic.
Joanne M. Friedman (Horses in the Yard)
You can achieve anything you want in life if you have the courage to dream it, the intelligence to make a realistic plan, and the will to see the plan through to the end.
Sidney Friedman (Your Mind Knows More Than You Do: The Subconscious Secrets of Success)
A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.
Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom)
How can I write a book? you might say. I've got nothing to say. Don't let that stop you. Very few writers have anything to say. The trick is to see how long you can conceal that from the reader. The most successful writers are ones who've been able to get away with it for the greatest number of pages and years.
Bruce Jay Friedman
I couldn't think. The basics of my life seemed altered and thrown into question. After all, our families--our ancestors--are our identities. Biology is destiny. I'm not who you think I am, I had said to T.J. the last time I'd seen him. Maybe I wasn't who I'd thought I was either.
Aimee Friedman (Sea Change)
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.
George Friedman (The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century)
In April 1933, Willie's mother, Myrle, gave birth to him in a manger somewhere along the old highway between Waco & Dallas. There were angels in attendance that night. Some of them, no doubt, flying too close to the ground:
Kinky Friedman (Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road)
We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.
Milton Friedman
This points to a nagging and important question about free-market ideologues: Are they ‘true believers’, driven by ideology and faith that free markets will cure underdevelopment, as is often asserted, or do the ideas and theories frequently serve as an elaborate rationale to allow people to act on unfettered greed while still invoking an altruistic motive?
Naomi Klein
I once heard Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo!, quote a senior Chinese government official as saying, "Where people have hope, you have a middle class." I think this is a very useful insight. The existence of large, stable middle classes around the world is crucial to geopolitical stability, but middle class is a state of mind, not a state of income. That's why a majority of Americans always describe themselves as "middle class," even though by income statistics some of them wouldn't be considered as such. "Middle class" is another way of describing people who believe that they have a pathway out of poverty or lower-income status toward a higher standard of living and a better future for their kids.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
The family, rather than the individual, has always been and remains today the basic building block of our society, though its hold has clearly been weakening—one of the most unfortunate consequences of the growth of government paternalism.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
Anyone who wishes to advance our species or an institution must possess those qualities which those who have little sense of self will perceive as narcissistic. All this besides the fact that “arrogant,” “headstrong,” “narcissistic,” and “cold” will be the terms used against any person who tries to be more himself or herself.
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
If you want to solve a big problem, you need to go from taking credit, to sharing credit, to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit. Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership. And the byproduct is both resilience and propulsion.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? "Mary got a quarter," Friedman says. "There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket." ... and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professionals.
Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers: The Story of Success)
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 powerful, the openness that has produced Bill Gates and Sally Ride. They deliberately define it all as decadence. Because if openness, women's empowerment, and freedom of thought and inquiry are the real sources of the West's economic strength, then the Arab-Muslim world would have to change. And the fundamentalists and extremists do not want to change.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
By this point in history—after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the midst of layers of ecological crises—free market fundamentalists should, by all rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to the world’s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch Industries, and ExxonMobil.
Naomi Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate)
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.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.
Milton Friedman
Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn't mean that he wasn't a great man!
Milton Friedman
If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him—the politician will not.
David D. Friedman (The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism)
Who are you? Just because you break hearts doesn't make you a heartbreaker. Just because you get straight A's doesn't make you a success. Just because you have a college consultant doesn't make you college bound. Just because you fail to act doesn't make you cowardly. Just because you need help, doesn't make you weak. Just because the world sees you as something or as nothing doesn't mean anything at all.
Robin Friedman (Nothing)
Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” And in a flat world, they can have them, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century)
What happens when we lose the things that anchor us? What if, instead of grasping at something to hold on to, we pull up our roots and walk away? Instead of trying to find the way back, we walk deeper and deeper into the woods, willing ourselves to get lost. In this place where nothing is recognizable. not the people or the language or the food, we are truly on our own. Eventually, we find ourselves unencumbered by the past or the future. Here is a fleeting glimpse of our truest self, our self in the present moment.
Rachel Friedman (The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost: A Memoir of Three Continents, Two Friends, and One Unexpected Adventure)
You can be a rich person alone. You can be a smart person alone. But you cannot be a complete person alone. For that you must be part of, and rooted in, an olive grove. This truth was once beautifully conveyed by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner in his interpretation of a scene from Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude: Márquez tells of a village where people were afflicted with a strange plague of forgetfulness, a kind of contagious amnesia. Starting with the oldest inhabitants and working its way through the population, the plague causes people to forget the names of even the most common everyday objects. One young man, still unaffected, tries to limit the damage by putting labels on everything. “This is a table,” “This is a window,” “This is a cow; it has to be milked every morning.” And at the entrance to the town, on the main road, he puts up two large signs. One reads “The name of our village is Macondo,” and the larger one reads “God exists.” The message I get from that story is that we can, and probably will, forget most of what we have learned in life—the math, the history, the chemical formulas, the address and phone number of the first house we lived in when we got married—and all that forgetting will do us no harm. But if we forget whom we belong to, and if we forget that there is a God, something profoundly human in us will be lost.
Thomas L. Friedman (The Lexus and the Olive Tree)
There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income. [In a Fox News interview in May 2004]
Milton Friedman
The fact is, parents and schools and cultures can and do shape people. The most important influence in my life, outside of my family, was my high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. She pounded the fundamentals of journalism into her students -- not simply how to write a lead or accurately transcribe a quote but, more important, how to comport yourself in a professional way. She was nearing sixty at the time I had her as my teacher and high school newspaper adviser in the late 1960s. She was the polar opposite of "cool," but we hung around her classroom like it was the malt shop and she was Wolfman Jack. None of us could have articulated it then, but it was because we enjoyed being harangued by her, disciplined by her, and taught by her. She was a woman of clarity and principles in an age of uncertainty. I sit up straight just thinking about her!
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
Dear Claire, "What" and "If" are two words as non-threatening as words can be. But put them together side-by-side and they have the power to haunt you for the rest of your life: What if? What if? What if? I don't know how your story ended but if what you felt then was true love, then it's never too late. If it was true then, why wouldn't it be true now? You need only the courage to follow your heart. I don't know what a love like Juliet's feels like: love to leave loved ones for, love to cross oceans for, but I'd like to believe if I ever were to feel it, that I'd have the courage to seize it. And Claire, if you didn't, I hope one day that you will. All my love, Juliet
Lise Friedman (Letters to Juliet: Celebrating Shakespeare's Greatest Heroine, the Magical City of Verona, and the Power of Love)
A willingness to be exposed and vulnerable. One of the major limitations of imagination’s fruits is the fear of standing out. It is more than a fear of criticism. It is anxiety at being alone, of being in a position where one can rely little on others, a position that puts one’s own resources to the test, a position where one will have to take total responsibility for one’s own response to the environment. Leaders must not only not be afraid of that position; they must come to love it.
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
I mean, to talk about "corporate greed" is like talking about "military weapons" or something like that―there just is no other possibility. A corporation is something that is trying to maximize power and profit: that's what it is. There is no "phenomenon" of corporate greed, and we shouldn't mislead people into thinking there is. It's like talking about "robber's greed" or something like that―it's not a meaningful thing, it's misleading. A corporation's purpose is to maximize profit and market share and return to investors, and all that kind of stuff, and if its officers don't pursue that goal, for one thing they are legally liable for not pursuing it. There I agree with Milton Friedman [right-wing economist] and those guys: if you're a C.E.O., you must do that―otherwise you're in dereliction of duty, in fact dereliction of duty. And besides that, if you don't do it, you'll get kicked out by the shareholders or the Board of Directors, and you won't be there very long anyway.
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Though a by-product of freedom, greater equality is not an accident. A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom, to enjoy a fuller and richer life.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
Fitbit is a company that knows the value of Shadow Testing. Founded by Eric Friedman and James Park in September 2008, Fitbit makes a small clip-on exercise and sleep data-gathering device. The Fitbit device tracks your activity levels throughout the day and night, then automatically uploads your data to the Web, where it analyzes your health, fitness, and sleep patterns. It’s a neat concept, but creating new hardware is time-consuming, expensive, and fraught with risk, so here’s what Friedman and Park did. The same day they announced the Fitbit idea to the world, they started allowing customers to preorder a Fitbit on their Web site, based on little more than a description of what the device would do and a few renderings of what the product would look like. The billing system collected names, addresses, and verified credit card numbers, but no charges were actually processed until the product was ready to ship, which gave the company an out in case their plans fell through. Orders started rolling in, and one month later, investors had the confidence to pony up $2 million dollars to make the Fitbit a reality. A year later, the first real Fitbit was shipped to customers. That’s the power of Shadow Testing.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
No one has expressed what is needed better than Abdel Rahman al-Rashed, the general manager of the London-based al-Arabiya news channel. One of the best-known and most respected Arab journalists working today, he wrote the following, in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat (September 6, 2004), after a series of violent incidents involving Muslim extremist groups from Chechnya to Saudi Arabia to Iraq: "Self-cure starts with self-realization and confession. We should then run after our terrorist sons, in the full knowledge that they are the sour grapes of a deformed culture... The mosque used to be a haven, and the voice of religion used to be that of peace and reconciliation. Religious sermons were warm behests for a moral order and an ethical life. Then came the neo-Muslims. An innocent and benevolent religion, whose verses prohibit the felling of trees in the absence of urgent necessity, that calls murder the most heinous of crimes, that says explicitly that if you kill one person you have killed humanity as a whole, has been turned into a global message of hate and a universal war cry... We cannot clear our names unless we own up to the shameful fact that terrorism has become an Islamic enterprise; an almost exclusive monopoly, implemented by Muslim men and women. We cannot redeem our extremist youth, who commit all these heinous crimes, without confronting the Sheikhs who thought it ennobling to reinvent themselves as revolutionary ideologues, sending other people's sons and daughters to certain death, while sending their own children to European and American schools and colleges.
Thomas L. Friedman (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century)
As ingenious as this explanation is, it seems to me to miss entirely the emotional significance of the text- its beautiful and beautifully economical evocation of certain difficult feelings that most ordinary people, at least, are all too familiar with: searing regret for the past we must abandon, tragic longing for what must be left behind. (...) Still, perhaps that's the pagan, the Hellenist in me talking. (Rabbi Friedman, by contrast, cannot bring himself even to contemplate that what the people of Sodom intend to do to the two male angels, as they crowd around Lot's house at the beginning of the narrative, is to rape them, and interpretation blandly accepted by Rashi, who blithely points out thta if the Sodomites hadn't wanted sexual pleasure from the angels, Lot wouldn't have suggested, as he rather startingly does, that the Sodomites take his two daughter as subsitutes. But then, Rashi was French.) It is this temperamental failure to understand Sodom in its own context, as an ancient metropolis of the Near East, as a site of sophisticated, even decadent delights and hyper-civilized beauties, that results in the commentator's inability to see the true meaning of the two crucial elements of this story: the angel's command to Lot's family not to turn and look back at the city they are fleeing, and the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt. For if you see Sodom as beautiful -which it will seem to be all the more so, no doubt, for having to be abandoned and lost forever, precisely the way in which, say, relatives who are dead are always somehow more beautiful and good than those who still live- then it seems clear that Lot and his family are commanded not to look back at it not as a punishment, but for a practical reason: because regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempts to make a new life, which is what Lot and his family now must do, as Noah and his family once had to do, as indeed all those who survive awful annihilations must somehow do. This explanation, in turn, helps explain the form that the punishment of Lot's wife took- if indeed it was a punishment to begin with, which I personally do not believe it was, since to me it seems far more like a natural process, the inevitable outcome of her character. For those who are compelled by their natures always to be looking back at what has been, rather than forward into the future, the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks, if not the author of Genesis, knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless, so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.
Daniel Mendelsohn (The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million)
America is in the earliest phase of its power. It is not fully civilized. America, like Europe in the sixteenth century, is still barbaric (a description, not a moral judgment). Its culture is unformed. Its will is powerful. Its emotions drive it in different and contradictory directions. Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn’t live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for. Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and that their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism undermines self-certainty Civilized people fight selectively but effectively.
George Friedman (The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century)
Those five characteristics are:    1. Reactivity: the vicious cycle of intense reactions of each member to events and to one another.    2. Herding: a process through which the forces for togetherness triumph over the forces for individuality and move everyone to adapt to the least mature members.    3. Blame displacement: an emotional state in which family members focus on forces that have victimized them rather than taking responsibility for their own being and destiny.    4. A quick-fix mentality: a low threshold for pain that constantly seeks symptom relief rather than fundamental change.    5. Lack of well-differentiated leadership: a failure of nerve that both stems from and contributes to the first four. To reorient oneself away from a focus on technology toward a focus on emotional process requires that, like Columbus, we think in ways that not only are different from traditional routes but that also sometimes go in the opposite direction. This chapter will thus also serve as prelude to the three that follow, which describe the “equators” we have to cross in our time: the “learned” fallacies or emotional barriers that keep an Old World orientation in place and cause both family and institutional leaders to regress rather than venture in new directions.
Edwin H. Friedman (A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix)
The ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about “the public interest,” “fair competition,” and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress (or a state legislature) to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials to “do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes its toll so that even the initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so firmly established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins.
Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
In 1994, Friedman wrote a memo marked “Very Confidential” to Raymond, Mortimer, and Richard Sackler. The market for cancer pain was significant, Friedman pointed out: four million prescriptions a year. In fact, there were three-quarters of a million prescriptions just for MS Contin. “We believe that the FDA will restrict our initial launch of OxyContin to the Cancer pain market,” Friedman wrote. But what if, over time, the drug extended beyond that? There was a much greater market for other types of pain: back pain, neck pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia. According to the wrestler turned pain doctor John Bonica, one in three Americans was suffering from untreated chronic pain. If that was even somewhat true, it represented an enormous untapped market. What if you could figure out a way to market this new drug, OxyContin, to all those patients? The plan would have to remain secret for the time being, but in his memo to the Sacklers, Friedman confirmed that the intention was “to expand the use of OxyContin beyond Cancer patients to chronic non-malignant pain.” This was a hugely audacious scheme. In the 1940s, Arthur Sackler had watched the introduction of Thorazine. It was a “major” tranquilizer that worked wonders on patients who were psychotic. But the way the Sackler family made its first great fortune was with Arthur’s involvement in marketing the “minor” tranquilizers Librium and Valium. Thorazine was perceived as a heavy-duty solution for a heavy-duty problem, but the market for the drug was naturally limited to people suffering from severe enough conditions to warrant a major tranquilizer. The beauty of the minor tranquilizers was that they were for everyone. The reason those drugs were such a success was that they were pills that you could pop to relieve an extraordinary range of common psychological and emotional ailments. Now Arthur’s brothers and his nephew Richard would make the same pivot with a painkiller: they had enjoyed great success with MS Contin, but it was perceived as a heavy-duty drug for cancer. And cancer was a limited market. If you could figure out a way to market OxyContin not just for cancer but for any sort of pain, the profits would be astronomical. It was “imperative,” Friedman told the Sacklers, “that we establish a literature” to support this kind of positioning. They would suggest OxyContin for “the broadest range of use.” Still, they faced one significant hurdle. Oxycodone is roughly twice as potent as morphine, and as a consequence OxyContin would be a much stronger drug than MS Contin. American doctors still tended to take great care in administering strong opioids because of long-established concerns about the addictiveness of these drugs. For years, proponents of MS Contin had argued that in an end-of-life situation, when someone is in a mortal fight with cancer, it was a bit silly to worry about the patient’s getting hooked on morphine. But if Purdue wanted to market a powerful opioid like OxyContin for less acute, more persistent types of pain, one challenge would be the perception, among physicians, that opioids could be very addictive. If OxyContin was going to achieve its full commercial potential, the Sacklers and Purdue would have to undo that perception.
Patrick Radden Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction)
One afternoon in the fall of 2015, while I was writing this book, I was driving in my car and listening to SiriusXM Radio. On the folk music station the Coffee House, a song came on with a verse that directly spoke to me—so much so that I pulled off the road as soon as I could and wrote down the lyrics and the singer’s name. The song was called “The Eye,” and it’s written by the country-folk singer Brandi Carlile and her bandmate Tim Hanseroth and sung by Carlile. I wish it could play every time you open these pages, like a Hallmark birthday card, because it’s become the theme song of this book. The main refrain is: I wrapped your love around me like a chain But I never was afraid that it would die You can dance in a hurricane But only if you’re standing in the eye. I hope that it is clear by now that every day going forward we’re going to be asked to dance in a hurricane, set off by the accelerations in the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law. Some politicians propose to build a wall against this hurricane. That is a fool’s errand. There is only one way to thrive now, and it’s by finding and creating your own eye. The eye of a hurricane moves, along with the storm. It draws energy from it, while creating a sanctuary of stability inside it. It is both dynamic and stable—and so must we be. We can’t escape these accelerations. We have to dive into them, take advantage of their energy and flows where possible, move with them, use them to learn faster, design smarter, and collaborate deeper—all so we can build our own eyes to anchor and propel ourselves and our families confidently forward.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)