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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 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
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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9/89 unleashed forces that ultimately liberated all the captive peoples of the Soviet EmpireThomas L. Friedman
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People will change their habits quickly IF they have a strong reason for doing so.Thomas L. Friedman
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Nobody works harder at learning than a curious kid.Thomas L. Friedman
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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.Thomas L. Friedman
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How you More people will learn about IBM from Wikipedia in the coming years than from IBM itself.Thomas L. Friedman
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Culture is nested in context, not genes.Thomas L. Friedman
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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.Thomas L. Friedman
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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
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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
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You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.Thomas L. Friedman
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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.Thomas L. Friedman
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No low-trust society will ever produce sustained innovation.Thomas L. Friedman
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Virulence is the sound of a self-selecting community talking to itself and positively reinforcing itself with no obligation to answer to anyone or look anyone in the eye.Thomas L. Friedman