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Quote by George Friedman

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

Author

George Friedman is a renowned political scientist, born on February 1, 1949. He is best known for founding Stratfor, an intelligence analysis company that provides global political, economic, and military trend analysis. more

“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.”

“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.”

Two War Century Gun Army Workers Encounters Bombs Pilots Factories 20th Century Factory Workers

Author:George Friedman

“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.”

“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.”

Philosophy Today Culture Individual Saws Building Industry Weapons Storm Desert Revolutionary Precision Desert Storm

Author:George Friedman

“The most horrible sort of war is civil war.”

War Horrible Civil War

Author:George Friedman

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

Long Neighbor Chinese Bother

Author:George Friedman

“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.”

Want Years Wells Country Stories Wanted Certain Cities New York Army Raised China Income Coast Interiors Prosperous Peasants Foreigners Tokyo Mao Coastal Shanghai

Author:George Friedman

“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.”

“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].”

Knows Humans Littles Happens Revolution Western China Chinese Journalist Human History Famine

Author:George Friedman

Quote by George Friedman

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