Alvin Toffler Quotes & Sayings

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives. — Alvin Toffler

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.
- Chinese proverb — Alvin Toffler

A library is a hospital for the mind. - Anonymous — Alvin Toffler

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible. — Alvin Toffler

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur. — Alvin Toffler

Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.
Structure provides the relatively fixed points of reference we need. That is why, for many people, a job is crucial psychologically, over and above the paycheck. By making clear demands on their time and energy, it provides an element of structure around which the rest of their lives can be organized. The absolute demands imposed on a parent by an infant, the responsibility to care for an invalid, the tight discipline demanded by membership in a church or, in some countries, a political party - all these may also impose a simple structure on life. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

Knowledge is knowing ... or knowing where to find out. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
- Chinese proverb — Alvin Toffler

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

It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one's own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others. — Alvin Toffler

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

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion. — Alvin Toffler

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." — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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

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

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

You cannot get a new economy without a new society. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

I work virtually every waking hour. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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

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

I helped lift a sixty-five-year-old woman out of the bloody machine that had just torn four fingers off her hand, and I still hear her cries - "Jesus and Mary, I won't be able to work again!"
The factory. Long live the factory! Today, even as new factories are being built, the civilization that made the factory into a cathedral is dying. And somewhere, right now, other young men and women are driving through the night into the heart of the emergent Third Wave civilization. Our task from here on will be to join, as it were, their quest for tomorrow. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life. — Alvin Toffler

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots - religion, nation, community, family, or profession - are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources. — Alvin Toffler

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

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

Never in history has distance meant less. — Alvin Toffler

Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba. But how much effort goes into studying the structure of everyday life - the way time is allocated, the personal uses of money, the places to go for help in a society exploding with complexity? We take for granted that young people already know their way around our social structure. In fact, most have only the dimmest image of the way the world of work or business is organized. Most students have no conception of the architecture of their own city's economy, or the way the local bureaucracy operates, or the place to go to lodge a complaint against a merchant. Most do not even understand how their own schools - even universities - are structured, let alone how much structures are changing under the impact of the Third Wave. — Alvin Toffler

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 — Alvin Toffler

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

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

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler

4. Knowledge is the most democratic source of power. — Alvin Toffler

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

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

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. — Alvin Toffler

Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama. — Alvin Toffler

The great growling engine of change - technology. — Alvin Toffler

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. — Alvin Toffler