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.

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.'

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

Never in history has distance meant less.

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.

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

I work virtually every waking hour.

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

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