Chrystia Freeland Quotes

Chrystia Freeland

Profession : Musician

Birth : August 2, 1968

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.

Chrystia Freeland

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.

Chrystia Freeland

Defending human rights should be an important objective of foreign policy, and that, too, will sometimes be hard to reconcile with an economic agenda, especially when it comes to dealing with rich but repressive players like China and Russia.

Chrystia Freeland

TED is certainly a gathering of an incredibly eclectic, incredibly interesting community, but it's also an elite community - at least an important portion comes from that global 1%.

Chrystia Freeland

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

Chrystia Freeland

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.

Chrystia Freeland

I do think that there is both a very powerful sense of entitlement and a kind of bubble of wealth which makes it hard for the people at the very top to understand the travails of the middle class.

Chrystia Freeland

If you've developed an ideology that what's good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that's quite wonderful because there's no moral tension.

Chrystia Freeland

The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice's oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

Chrystia Freeland

As income inequality increases, the social and political sway of those at the very, very top grows, too. They are nearly all men, and men whose lived experience tells them that women, for whatever reason, just don't have what it takes.

Chrystia Freeland

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

Chrystia Freeland

All of us can agree that we want government to work as well as possible, and we should all applaud efforts to improve it. But there is no escaping the divisive and essential questions: What is the purpose of the state, and whom does it serve?

Chrystia Freeland

A thing that really troubles me about a more polarized society is that you stop having a sense of society and citizenship.

Chrystia Freeland

Western investment is usually assumed to walk hand-in-hand with the democratic values of its home countries, and indeed, opening an economy to outside money is one of the textbook steps in a shift from authoritarianism to an open society.

Chrystia Freeland

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

Chrystia Freeland

The hollowing out of the middle class is a problem common to all Western industrialized economies. Maybe we should work together to solve it.

Chrystia Freeland

I interviewed Putin himself in 2000, shortly after he took over as president.

Chrystia Freeland

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.

Chrystia Freeland