Alvin Toffler famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Change #Positive

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

#Inspirational #Inspiring #Time

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.
-- Alvin Toffler

#Inspirational #Wisdom #Knowledge

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

#Education #Teaching #Doe

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

#Real #Anger #Society

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

#Change #Time #Stress

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

#Sides #Take A Chance #Daring

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

#Technology #Progress #Hazards

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

#Science #Talking #Together

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

#Law #Culture #Jam

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

#Technology

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

#Parenting #Inspire #Parenthood

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

#Sausage #Profit

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

#Business #Thinking #Textiles

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

#Wisdom #Data #Thought Provoking

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

#Change #Spiritual #Future

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

#Change #Life Changing #Process

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

#Powerful #Moving #Men

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

#Future #Responsibility #Destiny

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

#Giving #Birth #Mates

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

#Dream #Vision #Needs

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

#Technology #Numbers #Together

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

#Change #Management #Easier

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

#Yesterday #Survival #Firsts

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

#Running #People #Imagination

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

#Future #Order #Change Management

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

#Reading #Knowing

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

#Together #Next #Computer

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

#Facts #Substitutes

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

#Errors #Recognition #Metaphor

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

#Disorientation #Shock

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

#Country #Civilization #Appreciate

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

#Technology #People #Village

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

#Ideas #Suggestions #Assassins

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

#Struggle #Tomorrow #Institutions

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

#People #Vision #Experts

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

#Change #Limits #Humans

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

#Wind #Organization #Media

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

#Pace #Faster

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

#Change #Girl #Boys

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

#Men #Civilization #Trying

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

#Fiction #Sovereign #Shock

Interruptions: The average worker gets interrupted five times each hour. It takes an average of 5 minutes to handle each interruption and 1 minute to get back to what you were doing. This adds up to 30 minutes each hour or 50% of your time!! 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

#Thinking #Average #Time Management

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

#Years #Wife #Criticism

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

#Change #Technology #Change Management

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

#Technology #Strategy #Ecommerce

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

#Writing #Errors #Editors

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

#Inspirational #Management #Despise

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

#Change #Men #Overwhelmed

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

#Impact #Anchors #Roots

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

#Education #Learning #Chinese

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

#Loneliness #Being Alone #People

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

#Jobs #Play #People

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 #Endure

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

#Daughter #Mother #Loss

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

#Communication #Fire #Media

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

#Mind #Library

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

#Change #Country #Corporations

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

#Writing #Learning #Years

I work virtually every waking hour.
-- Alvin Toffler

#Waking #Hours

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.
-- Alvin Toffler

#Individual #Shock #Capable

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

#Civilization #Challenges #Criticism

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

#Expression #Political #Economic

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

#Future #Men #Data

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.
-- Alvin Toffler

#Change #Breathing #Perspective

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

#Technology #Civilization #Political

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

#Running #Emotional #Data

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

#Powerful #Coaching #Dimensions