Alvin Toffler Quotes

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

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

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 great growling engine of change - technology.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

A library is a hospital for the mind. - Anonymous

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.

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.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

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.

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.

4. Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

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.

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

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

I work virtually every waking hour.

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