Quotes by Alvin Toffler - Page 2

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 / Writer
Kings
Cutting
Knights
Copy Quote
If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Cycles
Faster
Pace
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Change
Future
Time
Shattering
Shock
Stress
Too Much
Change Future Time
Short
Individuals
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Learning
Illiterate Person
Writing
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Future
Destiny
Responsibility
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Technology
Civilization
Political
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Change
Girl
Boys
Copy Quote
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Challenges
Civilization
Criticism
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Assassins
Ideas
Suggestions
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Betray
Spring
Youth
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Change
Compelled
Endure
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Difficult
Process
Producers
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Business
Broke
Economy
Industrial Revolution
London
Manchester
Revolution
Textiles
Thinking
Entire
Industrial
Textile
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Lying
Responsibility
Teaching
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Absence
Dilemma
Future May People
Choice
Suffer
Victims
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Computers
Science
Computer
Function
Genetics
Talking
Together
Biological
Explosion
Major
Organic
Semiconductor
Substances
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Change
Corporations
Country
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Experts
People
Vision
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
New Ways
Profession
Roots
Shaking
Thrust
Anchor
Hurricane
Search
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Assembly
Criticism
Lines
Pace
Wife
Years
Criticisms
Intellectuals
Fully
Unlike
Industrial
Sets
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Errors
Metaphor
Recognition
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Running
Data
Emotional
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Appreciate
Civilization
Country
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Civilization
Skills
Together Again
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Change
Breathing
Perspective
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Civilization
Creative
Humanity
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Educational
Goal
Mistake
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Being Alone
Loneliness
People
Copy Quote
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 / Writer
Technology
People
Village
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Technology
Numbers
Together
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Mass Destruction
Organization
Wind
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Add
Average
Thinking
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Change
Communication
Fire
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Future
Men
Data
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Anchors
Impact
Roots
Copy Quote
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."
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Jobs
People
Play
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Ocean
Sea
Sky
Copy Quote
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.
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Running
Imagination
People
Copy Quote
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.'
Alvin Toffler / Writer
Men
Moving
Powerful
Copy Quote

Related Writer Authors

Voltaire
Writer
Sunday, Nov 21, 1694
Saturday, May 30, 1778
Oscar Wilde
Writer
Monday, Oct 16, 1854
Friday, Nov 30, 1900
Zoltan Istvan
Writer
Zoe Valdes
Writer
Saturday, May 02, 1959
Zlata Filipović
Writer
Wednesday, Dec 03, 1980
Zitkala-Sa
Writer
Tuesday, Feb 22, 1876
Wednesday, Jan 26, 1938
Ziauddin Sardar
Writer
Wednesday, Oct 31, 1951
Zelig Pliskin
Writer
Zan Perrion
Writer
Saturday, Jul 02, 1966
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor
Writer
Yusuf Idris
Writer
Thursday, May 19, 1927
Thursday, Aug 01, 1991
Young-Ha Kim
Writer
Monday, Nov 11, 1968
Yoshiki Nakamura
Writer
Tuesday, Jun 17, 1969
Yoko Ogawa
Writer
Friday, Mar 30, 1962
Yiyun Li
Writer
Saturday, Nov 04, 1972

View All Writer Quotes

Top Authors

Nelson Mandela
Former President Of South Africa
Thursday, Jul 18, 1918
Thursday, Dec 05, 2013
Barack Obama
44Th U.s. President
Friday, Aug 04, 1961
Theodore Roosevelt
26Th U.s. President
Wednesday, Oct 27, 1858
Monday, Jan 06, 1919
Mae West
Actress
Thursday, Aug 17, 1893
Saturday, Nov 22, 1980
Thomas Aquinas
Priest
Tuesday, Jan 28, 1225
Wednesday, Mar 07, 1274
Khalil Gibran
Poet
Saturday, Jan 06, 1883
Friday, Apr 10, 1931
George Orwell
Novelist
Thursday, Jun 25, 1903
Saturday, Jan 21, 1950
Pope Francis
Thursday, Dec 17, 1936
Billy Graham
Evangelist
Thursday, Nov 07, 1918
Marcus Aurelius
Roman Emperor
Saturday, Apr 26, 0121
Friday, Mar 17, 0180
John C. Maxwell
Author
Thursday, Feb 20, 1947
Mother Teresa
Saint
Friday, Aug 26, 1910
Friday, Sep 05, 1997
Friedrich Nietzsche
Philologist
Tuesday, Oct 15, 1844
Saturday, Aug 25, 1900
Groucho Marx
Comedian
Thursday, Oct 02, 1890
Friday, Aug 19, 1977
Deepak Chopra
Author
Wednesday, Oct 22, 1947

View All Authors

Alvin Toffler Quotes - Page 2

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Writer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page

Stay Connected

Picture Quotes Maker

Related Writer Authors

Popular Topic Tags

Top Authors

Share This Page