Toffler's Quotes

#1. Toffler's Law, I guess: the future arrives too soon and in the wrong order.

John Brunner

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

Alvin Toffler

#3. 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.

Alvin Toffler

#4. 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.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#9. 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

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#12. 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

#13. Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#15. 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.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#23. You've got to think about the big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. - Alvin Toffler

David Allen

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#28. 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

#29. 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.

Alvin Toffler

#30. I work virtually every waking hour.

Alvin Toffler

#31. 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.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#33. 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

#34. 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

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#38. 4. Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

Alvin Toffler

#39. Never in history has distance meant less.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#42. Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

Alvin Toffler

#43. 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

#44. Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

Alvin Toffler

#45. Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#47. A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.
- Chinese proverb

Alvin Toffler

#48. 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

#49. The great growling engine of change - technology.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#60. 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

#61. 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.

Alvin Toffler

#62. 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

#63. 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

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

Alvin Toffler

#65. You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#67. A library is a hospital for the mind. - Anonymous

Alvin Toffler

#68. If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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