Alvin Toffler Quotes

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

Appreciate Civilization Country Immposible
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

Science Talking Together
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

Cutting Kings Knights
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

Civilization Creative Humanity Restructuring Wave
Information overload will lead to ‘future shock syndrome’ as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Individual Information Suffering
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

Criticism Wife Years
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Change Changing Life Process
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

Civilization Political Technology
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

Anarchy Come Interconnection Unrelated
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Challenges Civilization Criticism
One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Anger Real Society
There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Change Humans Limits
The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday’s success.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Firsts Survival Yesterday
Profits, like sausages… are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Knows Profit Sausage
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

Basic Hinger Immediate Information Respond
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

Breathing Change Perspective
Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Change Future Spiritual
Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Hazard Progress Technology
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

Experts People Vision
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.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Committed Jobs People Play Satisfaction
Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Economic Expression Political
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

Change Corporations Country
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

Betray Education Spring Youth
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

Data Provoking Thought Wisdom
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

Lying Responsibility Teaching
The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Computer Next Together
Knowledge is promiscuous. It mates and gives birth to more knowledge.
ALVIN TOFFLER

Birth Giving Mates

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