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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.