Alvin Toffler Quotes

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 computer is a greater threat to the [nuclear] family than all the abortion laws and gay rights movements and pornography in the world.

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."

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

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I work virtually every waking hour.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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 future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.

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.

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

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

Never in history has distance meant less.

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.

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

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