Latest George Friedman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  George Friedman

  War, Technology, Men

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• The importance of the question and the availability of an answer are two different things. I'm not willing to state that because the question is fundamental, therefore I possess the answer. And I'm certainly not willing to say that since I don't possess the answer, I'll pretend that I do.

  George Friedman

  Two, Availability, Fundamentals

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• 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.

  George Friedman

  Violence, Moral, Circumstances

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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

  George Friedman

  War, Thinking, Example

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• One definition of the wicked is that they will resort to whatever means are necessary to achieve their ends. Therefore, if those who oppose wickedness don't learn the art of war, they will be helpless.

  George Friedman

  Art, War, Mean

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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

  George Friedman

  War, Hate, Men

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• The poets think about war more than the social scientists.

  George Friedman

  War, Thinking, Scientist

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• 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.

  George Friedman

  War, Evil, Needs

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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

  George Friedman

  War, Lust, Geopolitical

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• When you're young and going to war, it's a genuinely exciting moment. You are going to risk yourself. On the battlefield, you are suddenly free. You realize: I'm here, I'm in it. Exaltation. Suddenly you're hit by another extraordinary feeling: my God, I can be killed. And: will I embarrass myself? It's like you're in a kaleidoscope and all of these extraordinary feelings are zipping by.

  George Friedman

  War, Feelings, Risk

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• Every theory I've seen that contains an explanation of war fails. I think they fail for the same reason that explanations of sex fail. War derives from things so deep and so complex, I'm thoroughly baffled by it at the end of the day.

  George Friedman

  Sex, War, Thinking

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• War to me is very much like sex. You can develop a theory that says sex is primarily for the exchange of genetic material, or that it's a celebration of life, or you can make up 50,000 theories about why human beings have sex, all of which are in some sense true, all of which by themselves miss the point. Because the answer is extraordinarily complex. It may be for fun, it may be for reproduction, for financial reasons, any number of things.

  George Friedman

  Sex, Fun, War

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• War and sex are what I call the two abysmal - by that I mean deep - parts of the human condition.

  George Friedman

  Sex, War, Mean

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• One of the great famines in human history took place during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. [At the same time] Western journalists were reporting how marvelously Chinese society was working. We know so little [about what happens in China].

  George Friedman

  Chinese, Littles, Revolution

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• The Chinese central government will slowly and steadily lose authority while regional armies [gain power]. The Western powers are going to take sides to protect their investments - they have put billions of dollars into Shanghai. Their fear is that [these investments] are going to be expropriated by a warlord from the interior who will sweep down on Shanghai. They will try to form alliances with warlords to protect their concessions, and there will be a huge flow of weapons into China.

  George Friedman

  Army, Government, Chinese

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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

  George Friedman

  Long, Chinese, Neighbor

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• 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.

  George Friedman

  Country, New York, Army

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• The most horrible sort of war is civil war.

  George Friedman

  War, Civil War, Horrible

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• The British bombed German cities [during World War II] to keep the workers awake at night. So instead of dropping one bomb, we sent a thousand planes and, yes, we took out the factory sometimes, but we also took out the city. It reached the point where we wanted more efficient ways to destroy a city. The result was nuclear weapons.

  George Friedman

  War, Night, Cities

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• What is revolutionary today is that we're using precision-guided munitions. And instead of building individual weapons, we are building an industry and a philosophy, the culture of precision. You saw Desert Storm. Precision works.

  George Friedman

  Philosophy, Storm, Culture

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• 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.

  George Friedman

  War, Army, Gun

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

• There is a radical and unprecedented shift [in war] that is part of the general transformation of civilization. First, understand that the past 150 years of warfare are totally unprecedented in that we introduced a breathtakingly inefficient technology: guns. In the First World War, and this is not an exaggeration, it took 10,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one person. Any given shot had a one in 10,000 probability of ending someone's life.

  George Friedman

  War, Technology, Gun

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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

  George Friedman

  Warrior, Decision, Faces

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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

  George Friedman

  Battle, Rage, Losing Yourself

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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

  George Friedman

  War, Important, Elements

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com