Alvin Toffler
Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.Collection: Parenting
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.Collection: Future
The great growling engine of change - technology.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Computers
Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.Collection: Technology
Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Religion
One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.Collection: Society
Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.Collection: Power
Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Business
You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.Collection: Intelligence
People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.Collection: Future
Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.Collection: Technology
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.
It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.
I work virtually every waking hour.
Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.
The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.
The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.
Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.
We futurists have a magic button. We follow every statement about a failed forecast with 'yet.'
Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.
One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.
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.
No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.
The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Change
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.'Collection: Powerful
The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success.Collection: Yesterday
If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Impact
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.Collection: Lying
A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Running
Knowledge is knowing... or knowing where to find out.Collection: Reading
It is always easier to talk about change than to make it.Collection: Change
A library is a hospital for the mind.” - AnonymousCollection: Mind
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.Collection: Change
Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.Collection: Space
The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Change
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.Collection: Technology
If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.Collection: Pace
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.Collection: Civilization
There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.Collection: Change