Top 89 Quotes & Sayings by Alvin Toffler

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.

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

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

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.

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.

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

The great growling engine of change - technology.

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

I work virtually every waking hour.

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.

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

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.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

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

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

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.

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

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

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

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

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.

We futurists have a magic button. We follow every statement about a failed forecast with 'yet.'

No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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 future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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."

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

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

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

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