Alvin Toffler Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

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

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

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.

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.

Never in history has distance meant less.

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

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.

I work virtually every waking hour.

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.

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

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

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.

The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together.

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

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

The great growling engine of change - technology.

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