Top 99 Quotes & Sayings by Chrystia Freeland - Page 2

In Western capitalism circa 2013, fear that the market economy has become dysfunctional is not limited to a few entrepreneurs in Boulder. It is being publicly expressed, with increasing frequency, by some of the people who occupy the commanding heights of the global economy.

I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium.

In America, we have equated personal business success with public virtue.

Fancy GPS systems and space-age tractors are what most excite the farmers I know and astound their city friends.

Our battle over the size of the state overlooks a problem that is just as important and that may be easier to muster the collective will to resolve: how effective government is, regardless of its scale.

I am a very strong supporter of our government's view that it is important to engage with all countries around the world - very much including Russia.

Urbanites may picture farmers as hip heritage-pig breeders returning to the land, or a struggling rural underclass waging a doomed battle to hang on to their patrimony as agribusiness moves in. But these stereotypes are misleading.

Income inequality is one thing, but a permanent division into the haves and have-nots is an entirely different thing - and much less acceptable.

If you doubt that we live in a winner-take-all economy and that education is the trump card, consider the vast amounts the affluent spend to teach their offspring.

The triumph of economic liberalization has coincided with a sharp increase in income inequality.

In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult.

I really believe in hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

If the Tea Party gets its way, there will be less government - which is great for the elites. They don't need the government.

Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth.

Companies and capital operate internationally, often beyond the economic reach of any particular nation-state. People are pretty global, too, living lives that freely cross national borders.

One thing America gets right is being open to innovation. Canada and Scandinavia have to do better on that.

The economic reality is that, thanks to smart machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were the backbone of Western democracies are vanishing.

There are no bad seats at the cabinet table.

One of the most important political and economic facts of this young century is that capital has been slipping the traces of the nation-state. Business is global; government is national.

Shipping middle-class jobs to China, or hollowing them out with machines, is a win for smart managers and their shareholders. We call the result higher productivity. But, looked at through the lens of middle-class jobs, it is a loss.

Corporations are not employment agencies, and judging them by that metric is a mistake.

I have always liked hanging out with people and talking to people.

We are very proud, wherever we are in the world, to tell you about Canadian values and what we think is the right thing for Canada to do. And when it comes to refugees, we very much believe in welcoming refugees to our country, and that includes Syrian refugees, and that includes Muslim refugees.

Sprawling, earnest, and ambitious - its modest title is 'The Future' - Al Gore's new book embodies both the virtues and the flaws of its author. But those hardy souls who slog past the weaknesses will be rewarded by a book that is brave, original and often fun.

Assad is not the greatest ally to have.

My respect for politicians has increased. It's hard work - even hard physical work.

The tragedy of 9/11 and the bloody scrambling-up of the Middle East were painful reminders that the world had not yet reached any end-of-history ideal. But these events mattered less to the assumptions and strategies of huge multinational companies than one might guess.

Twitter-lutionaries are good at toppling regimes, but in the Mideast and North Africa, they're losing out to the Islamists, who've built protest movements the old-fashioned way. And in Moscow, the Mink revolutionaries, who are united by Live-Journal but not much else, were easy for Putin to outmaneuver.

Environmentally friendly business practices have long been mainstream, particularly when they create a brand advantage, as with organic foods.

Slavery is America's original sin and was the great global injustice of that age.

I see real opportunities for us to have stronger, closer collaboration between the three North American partners and seize on opportunities to achieve objectives of more jobs and growth.

We in Canada are not going to say Muslims are worse than Christians or are worse than Jews or are worse than atheists.

What is interesting is that, although it is framed as a war between the elites and Main Street, the Tea Party is actually really good for the elites.

This notion that borders wouldn't matter, that we would have commonality of interests around the world. Well, guess who got there first? The plutocrats.

Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality - financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico.

It's public knowledge that there have been efforts - as U.S. intelligence sources have said - by Russia to destabilize the U.S. political system. I think that Canadians and, indeed, other Western countries should be prepared for similar efforts to be directed at us.

When you think of technological revolution, you probably think of geeks in cool coastal spaces like the Google campus, or perhaps of math wizards on Wall Street. But one source of rural prosperity is the adoption of radical new technologies - and a consequent surge in productivity.

One of the great, and largely forgotten, triumphs of American society and government has been how smoothly U.S. farmers and their communities negotiated the creative destruction of the early 20th century and emerged triumphant when it was over.

The challenge of weaning ourselves off fossil fuel even as it becomes more abundant will make the old fights about energy conservation seem like child's play.