A Quote by Thomas Friedman

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

Thomas Friedman

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Ask Back Century Cities Climate Confluence Crossed Decade Did Displaced Energy Evidence Few First Floods Food Governments Growth How Look Natural Now Obvious Once Ourselves Panic Population Prices Really Records Resource Set Some Thinking Threatened Through Were Whether Wonder World World Population Years

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Thomas Friedman
American - Journalist
Born: July 20, 1953

City farming is not only possible, it is the very definition of the kind of meaningful, sustainable innovation we will need to meet the grand challenges of the 21st century: climate change; population growth; ageing population; urbanization; rising demand for energy, food and water; poverty; and access to healthcare.

Frans van Houten

It's coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It's not just climate change; it's sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now.

David Attenborough

Fifty percent of the world's population lives in cities. In a couple of decades, 70 percent of the world's population will be living in cities. Cities are where the problem is. Cities are where the solution is, where creativity exists to address the challenges and where they have most impact. This is why, in 2005, the C40 was founded, an organization of cities that address climate change. It started with 18 cities; now it's 91. Cities simply are the key to saving the planet.

Michael Bloomberg

When the world changed, people were different. Towns closed, cities were boarded up, communities abandoned, their governments collapsed. They seemed to have no qualms that were obvious to you or me about walking away from what they called a useless pile of rubbish, and never looking back.

Alexis Wright

One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.

Immanuel Wallerstein

People were desperately trying to fill their seats for the summer. And so prices are really low right now. And so they are kept from raising prices to make up for that difference.

David Neeleman

The most obvious risk was that the Russian speaking population was threatened and that the threats were absolutely specific and tangible. This is what made Crimean residents, the people who live there, think about their future and ask Russia for help. This is what guided our decision.

Vladimir Putin

Some global hazards are insidious. They stem from pressure on energy supplies, food, water and other natural resources. And they will be aggravated as the population rises to a projected nine billion by mid-century, and by the effects of climate change. An 'ecological shock' could irreversibly degrade our environment.

Martin Rees

I think our children will be living on floating cities, and they will look back on the 20th Century, when people lived in primitive governments founded in previous centuries, and they will be living on modular, sustainable, floating cities that we can't imagine now, that are based on the voluntary choice of citizens. I think we will have a marvellous world in the 21st Century.

Joe Quirk

Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you'll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Mary Schmich

Everybody talks about population growth and its disastrous effect on climate change, food security and resource depletion, but nobody does anything about it

Phil Harding

One thing that's really interesting is not only the magnitude of the recent immigration into this country, but also its distribution and its investment in the country. About 9.3 percent of the population is now foreign-born [announced by the Census Bureau at over 10 percent a few days later]. What's really surprising is how well distributed those population groups are. Historically, we see new immigrants primarily on the coast and in a few big cities. I think the data are going to show a much wider distribution of the new population groups than we've experienced historically.

Kenneth Prewitt

Through a lot of scientific and left-hemisphere thinking in the last 400 years, we've separated ourselves from nature, as if we were superior. We were looking at nature as a resource that we could manipulate. I think we're coming to a new understanding that it's just impossible. We are nature. We can't remove ourselves. We need to think more interdependently.

Tiffany Shlain

The 1960s and 1970s were the real years for independent film, because they were really independent. Plus, there were hundreds of distributors. There were all these companies that basically did exploitation, but they were independent. Now, there are very few independent distributors.

John Landis

New states were supposed to join the union when they reached a certain population, but in the late 19th century, population mattered a great deal less than partisanship.

Heather Cox Richardson

It is environmental illiteracy and a complete lack of forward thinking to ignore the need to halt and then reverse population growth in the context of climate change, travel congestion, unaffordable housing, and resource depletion

Phil Harding

A Quote by Thomas Friedman

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