George Friedman Quotes

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.

Conventional analysis suffers from a profound failure of imagination. It imagines passing clouds to be permanent and is blind to powerful, long-term shifts taking place in full view of the world.

I think there are worse things than war. For example, injustice.

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.

What is American strategy first of all? So American strategy is to command the seas, right? The foundation of our power is sea control. Nobody can invade us, but we can invade them.

Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.

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

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

The poets think about war more than the social scientists.

The tragedy of the human condition is that the thing that makes us most human - community - originates in the inhumanity of war.

I'm not a journalist. So I didn't down and let Assad charm me. I didn't walk away and say "my god he's got an Apple computer and he really likes Beyonce so he must be a liberal."

Europeans have always thought of U.S. presidents as either naive, as they did with Jimmy Carter, or as cowboys, as they did with Lyndon Johnson, and held them in contempt in either case.

The Chinese have a long history of slaughtering each other without bothering their neighbors.

Recent presidents have gone off on ad hoc adventures. They have set unattainable goal because they have framed the issue incorrectly, as they believed their own rhetoric.

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

The kind of president we need has little to do with ideology and more to do with a willingness to wield power to moral ends.

The important thing in war is that there is an element of rage, but you must remain very distant from it.

So as soon as you want something to happen you begin skewing the data to support it. Our stuff is invaluable to decision-makers precisely because we have no ax to grind.

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.

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

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.

Strategy is something that emerges from reality, while tactics might be chosen.

I cannot understand how something as ubiquitous as war can simply be dismissed as pathological. It is not clear to me that it is an unspeakable evil. If it is, I need proof of it.

By the 20th century, war ceased to be an encounter between two armies. It became an encounter between two societies, because a factory worker producing a gun or a bomb is as deadly as a pilot.

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

The most horrible sort of war is civil war.

The man who hates war more than he hates the Nazis is a wicked man.

If you lose yourself to rage in the complexity of battle, you are going to be lost.

A research division develops marketing material for its deal makers. We have no policy position. If you have a policy position you can't possibly forecast.

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

A president must know what it is he does not know, and he should remain calm in pursuit of it, but there is no obligation to be honest about it.

The worst president is closer by nature to the best then either is to anyone who has not gone through what it requires to become president.

Presidents and other politicians manage the appearance of things, largely by manipulating the air and hope.

Long-term solutions are more attractive and cause much less controversy than short-term solutions, which will affect people who are still alive and voting.

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.