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 TOFFLERMy 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 TOFFLERTo 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 TOFFLERThe future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.
ALVIN TOFFLERChange is not merely necessary to life – it is life.
ALVIN TOFFLERThe 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 TOFFLERThe 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 TOFFLERTo survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.
ALVIN TOFFLERIf industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.
ALVIN TOFFLERWe need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies – images of potential tomorrows.
ALVIN TOFFLERThe computer is a greater threat to the [nuclear] family than all the abortion laws and gay rights movements and pornography in the world.
ALVIN TOFFLERThe political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.
ALVIN TOFFLERInformation overload will lead to ‘future shock syndrome’ as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances.
ALVIN TOFFLERYou’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 TOFFLERThe next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together.
ALVIN TOFFLERMan has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.
ALVIN TOFFLEROur technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.
ALVIN TOFFLER