Explore Quotes by Alvin Toffler

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets_x000D__x000D_loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today_x000D__x000D_the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the_x000D__x000D_techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.

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

A library is a hospital for the mind.” - Anonymous

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.

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.

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