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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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