People From Minneapolis

"Can Iraqis get this government together? If they do, I think the American public will continue to want to support the effort there to try to produce a decent, stable Iraq. But if they don't, then I think the bottom is going to fall out of public support here for the whole Iraq endeavor. So one way or another, I think we're in the end game in the sense it's going to be decided in the next weeks or months whether there's an Iraq there worth investing in. And that is something only Iraqis can tell us."

"I think we are in the end game. The next six to nine months are going to tell whether we can produce a decent outcome in Iraq."

"I think we're in the end game there, in the next three to six months, Bob. We've got for the first time an Iraqi government elected on the basis of an Iraqi constitution. Either they're going to produce the kind of inclusive consensual government that we aspire to in the near term, in which case America will stick with it, or they're not, in which case I think the bottom's going to fall out."

"I think that we're going to know after six to nine months whether this project has any chance of succeeding. In which case, I think the American people as a whole will want to play it out or whether it really is a fool's errand."

"We're at the beginning of, I think, the decisive, I would say, six months in Iraq, OK, because I feel like this election—you know, I felt from the beginning Iraq was going to be ultimately, Charlie, what Iraqis make of it."

"We've teed up this situation for Iraqis, and I think the next six months really are going to determine whether this country is going to collapse into three parts or more or whether it's going to come together."

"The only thing I am certain of is that in the wake of this election, Iraq will be what Iraqis make of it—and the next six months will tell us a lot. I remain guardedly hopeful."

"I think we're in the end-game now…. I think we're in a six-month window here where it's going to become very clear and this is all going to pre-empt, I think, the next congressional election—that's my own feeling—let alone the presidential one."

"That will become clear in the next few months as we see just what kind of minority the Sunnis in Iraq intend to be. If they come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind."

"Improv time is over. This is crunch time. Iraq will be won or lost in the next few months. But it won't be won with high rhetoric. It will be won on the ground in a war over the last mile."

"What we're gonna find out, Bob, in the next six to nine months is whether we have liberated a country or uncorked a civil war."

"What I absolutely don't understand is just at the moment when we finally have a UN-approved Iraqi-caretaker government made up of—I know a lot of these guys—reasonably decent people and more than reasonably decent people, everyone wants to declare it's over. I don't get it. It might be over in a week, it might be over in a month, it might be over in six months, but what's the rush? Can we let this play out, please?"

"The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time."

"What Biden is trying to achieve is equivalent of having a Rubic's cube and trying to align all the colors on the same side"

"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?"

"Israel should really reflect on what's going on in Egypt. It does not want to be the Hosni Mubarak of the peace process."

"The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed."

"One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century."

"The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels."

"I was speaking out in Minnesota—my hometown, in fact—and a guy stood up in the audience, said, "Mr. Friedman, is there any free trade agreement you’d oppose?" I said, "No, absolutely not." I said, "You know what, sir? I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade initiative. I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.""

"Now we've entered Globalization 3.0, and it is shrinking the world from size small to a size tiny."

"We needed to go over there, basically, and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.… What they [Muslims] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad and basically saying "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this!" That, Charlie, is what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia! It was part of that bubble. We could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could."

"You win the presidency by connecting with the American people's gut insecurities and aspirations. You win with a concept. The concept I'd argue for is "neoliberalism." More Americans today are natural neolibs, than neocons. Neoliberals believe in a muscular foreign policy and a credible defense budget, but also a prudent fiscal policy that balances taxes, deficit reduction and government services."

"Reading Europe's press, it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have embraced President Bush's formulation that an "axis of evil" threatens world peace. There's only one small problem. President Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and the Europeans think it's Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice."

"We need to send the message that anyone who orders suicide bombings against Americans, or protects those who do, commits suicide himself. And U.S. marines will search every cave in Afghanistan to make that principle stick. You order, you die—absolutely, positively, you die."

"After two years of traveling almost exclusively to Western Europe and the Middle East, Poland feels like a geopolitical spa. I visited here for just three days and got two years of anti-American bruises massaged out of me. Get this: people here actually tell you they like America—without whispering. What has gotten into these people? Have all their subscriptions to Le Monde Diplomatique expired? Haven't they gotten the word from Berlin and Paris? No, they haven't. In fact, Poland is the antidote to European anti-Americanism. Poland is to France what Advil is to a pain in the neck. Or as Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins foreign affairs specialist, remarked after visiting Poland: "Poland is the most pro-American country in the world—including the United States.""

"The Golden Straitjacket is the defining political-economic garment of this globalization era.... The tighter you wear it, the more gold it produces."

"The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism. Other systems may be able to distribute and divide income more efficiently and equitably, but none can generate income to distribute as efficiently as free-market capitalism."

"China's going to have a free press.... Oh, China's leaders don't know it yet, but they are being pushed straight in that direction."

"The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

"No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other.... The question raised by the McDonald's example is whether there is a tip-over point at which a country, by integrating with the global economy, opening itself up to foreign investment and empowering its consumers, permanently restricts its capacity for troublemaking and promotes gradual democratization and widening peace."

"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too."

"Sooner or later, Mr. Bush argued, sanctions would force Mr. Hussein's generals to bring him down, and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein."

"Only if you give the Palestinians something to lose is there a hope that they will agree to moderate their demands.… I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands."

"It seems beyond the comprehension of people that someone can be born to draw comic strips, but I think I was. My ambition from earliest memory was to produce a daily comic strip."

"Don't worry about the world coming to an end today ...... It's already tomorrow in Australia."

"The only thing I really ever wanted to be was a cartoonist. That's my life. Drawing."

"I just draw what I think is funny, and I hope other people think it is funny, too."

"If I were a better artist, I'd be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I'd write books — but I'm not, so I draw cartoons!"

"I never give my work to somebody else and say, "What do you think about that?" I just don't trust anybody. If I think it's funny, or if I think it's silly, I send it in anyway because I'm just trying to please myself. I never try to please a certain audience. I think that's disastrous. There's no way in the world you can anticipate what your reader is going to like or dislike."

"A cartoonist is someone who has to draw the same thing day after day without repeating himself."

"It is filled with beauty. . . a finely made whole that seems to emanate from a very special grace."

"A hypnotist's crystal... sparkled with diamonds."

"When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion."

"To an experienced Zen Buddhist, asking if one believes in Zen or one believes in the Buddha, sounds a little ludicrous, like asking if one believes in air or water. Similarly Quality is not something you believe in, Quality is something you experience."

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions."

"Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food."

"Good is a noun rather than an adjective."

"The most moral activity of all is the creation of space for life to move around."

"Between the subject and the object lies the value. This Value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any 'self' or any 'object' to which it may be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed."