Alvin Toffler Quotations

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.

Future shock is the shattering stress and disorientation that we induce in individuals by subjecting them to too much change in too short a time.

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.

Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.

To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

The great growling engine of change - technology.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today - and will make possible tomorrow.

A library is a hospital for the mind.” - Anonymous

If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.

Every generation gets a chance to change the world Pity the nation that won't listen to your boys and girls Cos the sweetest melody is the one we haven't heard

Society needs people who...know how to be compassionate and honest...Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone.

There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.

Idea-assassins rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd.

Rational behavior ... depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least a fair success, the outcome of his own actions. To do this, he must be able to predict how the environment will respond to his acts. Sanity, itself, thus hinges on man's ability to predict his immediate, personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.

Many countries today have begun the transition from an industrial wealth system and civilization to a knowledge-based system - without appreciating that a new wealth system is impossible without a corresponding new way of life.

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

Interruptions: The average worker gets interrupted five times each hour. It takes an average of 5 minutes to handle each interruption and 1 minute to get back to what you were doing. This adds up to 30 minutes each hour or 50% of your time!! You've got to think about "big things" while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

Designer's derive their rewards from 'inner standards of excellence, from the intrinsic satisfaction of their tasks. They are committed to the task, not the job. To their standards, not their boss.' So whereas most people divide their lives between time spent earning money and time spent spending it, designers generally lead a seamless existence in which work and play are synonymous. As Milanese designer Richard Sapper put it: "I never work-all the time."

In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.

Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.

I work virtually every waking hour.

Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.

By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.

Human beings were held accountable long before there were corporate bureaucracies. If the knight didn't deliver, the king cut off his head.

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.

It would be a mistake to assume that the present day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals.

We need people who can see straight ahead and deep into the problems. Those are the experts. But we also need peripheral vision and experts are generally not very good at providing peripheral vision.

Never in history has distance meant less.

If you have the right knowledge you can substitute it for all the other facts of production

Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.

The customer will become so integrated into the production process that we will find it more and more difficult to tell just who is actually the consumer and the producer.

The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow's worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.

Knowledge is promiscuous. It mates and gives birth to more knowledge.

Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically. Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a new super-machine.

Much education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.

Future shock is the disorientation that affects an individual, a corporation, or a country when he or it is overwhelmed by change and the prospect of change ... we are in collision with tomorrow.

Information overload will lead to 'future shock syndrome' as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances.

One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives, and it is important to look at it closely, not merely from the grand perspectives of history, but also from the vantage point of the living, breathing individuals who experience it.

The computer is a greater threat to the [nuclear] family than all the abortion laws and gay rights movements and pornography in the world.

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.

The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.

Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.

In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can't read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again.

If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.” - Chinese proverb

The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.

Change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways

If you don't have a viable strategy, you will be defeated by someone who does.

The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.

We need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies - images of potential tomorrows.

If we do not learn from history, we shall be compelled to relive it. True. But if we do not change the future, we shall be compelled to endure it. And that could be worse.

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

Industrial vomit...fills our skies and seas. Pesticides and herbicides filter into our foods. Twisted automobile carcasses, aluminum cans, non-returnable glass bottles and synthetic plastics form immense middens in our midst as more and more of our detritus resists decay. We do not even begin to know what to do with our radioactive wastes - whether to pump them into the earth, shoot them into outer space, or pour them into the oceans. Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

The secret message communicated to most young people today by the society around them is that they are not needed, that the society will run itself quite nicely until they - at some distant point in the future - will take over the reigns. Yet the fact is that the society is not running itself nicely... because the rest of us need all the energy, brains, imagination and talent that young people can bring to bear down on our difficulties. For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.

Knowledge is knowing... or knowing where to find out.

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.

Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.

The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success.

The responsibility for change...lies within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: 'The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction—how to teach himself. Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.'

It is always easier to talk about change than to make it.

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

Our moral responsibility is not to stop future, but to shape it...to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

South Korea is heavily dependent on exports and therefore accepts the general assumption that this trend will continue with no reversal.

You simply *must* stop taking advice from other people.

In Europe, countries like Finland, Sweden and Ireland are doing better than larger neighbors like Britain, France and Germany.

The illiterates of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn

The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn.

The illiterate of the future are not those that cannot read or write. They are those that can not learn, unlearn, relearn.

The future arrives too soon and in the wrong order