Best 78 quotes of Alvin Toffler on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.'

Change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways

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

Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Human beings were held accountable long before there were corporate bureaucracies. If the knight didn't deliver, the king cut off his head.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

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

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.