George Friedman Quotes

One of the great weaknesses of journalists is they interview people and they think that's important. They think that they are going to show them their true hand. But more to the point, they're trapped.

When I went to war, I did not go making geopolitical calculations. I went to war with a lust.

While certain coastal cities have become very prosperous, the rest of China has a per capita income of $200 a year. The coast wants to have nothing to do with the interior; it wants to work with Tokyo and New York. This is an old story in China. It is why Mao succeeded in 1927. He wanted [coastal] Shanghai to throw the foreigners out, but Shanghai was doing too well financially [to expel foreigners]. So Mao went to the interior and raised a peasant army. He came back to Shanghai and sealed off the country.

The United State has a net worth against which our debt is a joke ... we wrote in 2008 the United States is going to come out of this recession fast. The Europeans are going to fragment. The Chinese are going to be cremated. Why could we come out of it? Why has all economic theory been proven wrong? Because we're rich and we could afford it.

Idealism is frequently another word for self-righteousness, a disease that can only be corrected by a profound understanding power in its complete sense.

Constraint theory defines for you what outcomes are possible and what outcomes are impossible. It also eliminates wishful thinking.

Germany is the new pig. Germany depends on exports and its markets are drying up. When the Germans start getting 10% unemployment, 15% unemployment, which is the real variable, how are they going to handle it?

Now if you can recognize and memorize a grandmaster's game, and you have the respect to understand [Zimbabwean president Robert] Mugabe who has survived past anyone's expectations, and make the simple assumption it wasn't an accident, and you understand why he did what he did, now you're ready to predict ... The key to forecasting is to understand both the constraints nations are under and the manner in which the struggle for power shapes leaders.

We cannot anticipate the moral circumstances under which we will live. And therefore [I refuse] to say that I will not live in a moral circumstance that requires violence.

But every time new powers emerge they have to find their balance. New powers are emerging, old powers are declining. It's not that process that's dangerous, it's the emerging position that's dangerous.

The warrior must continue to make decisions in the face of extreme circumstances. He cannot afford to get angry or frightened.

In a way, we can have a much easier discussion about the future of technology than we can about why a young man kills another man in a war.

Because the US has control of the sea. Because the US has built up its wealth. Because the US is the only country in the world really not to have a war fought on its territory since the time of the Civil War ... Therefore we can afford mistakes that would kill other countries. And therefore we can take risks that they can't ... the core answer to why the United States is like this is we didn't fight World War I and World War II and the Cold War here.

War is an extraordinary condition to be in - to be, for example, in the combat information center of a warship [and behaving] as though you were merely processing credit card applications. [Instead,] the information you're processing is that an incoming missile is 15 kilometers away, now 10 kilometers away, now 5 kilometers. You have to separate yourself psychologically from the fact that your mortal existence may well end. That is the ancient reality of war.