QuoteProject
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
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Toffler reflects on the dehumanizing aspects of industrial work and how personal experience grants deeper understanding.

In this quote, Alvin Toffler emphasizes the significance of personal experience in grasping the critiques of industrialization. By spending years working on assembly lines, he and his wife gained firsthand insight into the mechanized and often alienating nature of such labor, highlighting how individuals can become mere extensions of machines rather than fulfilled workers. This understanding stands in contrast to the perspectives held by those who criticize the system without experiencing it directly.

Themes

IndustrializationExperienceCriticismWorkMachines

In practice

Example use cases

In a speech about the importance of understanding the workforce, one could cite this quote to emphasize the value of firsthand experience in shaping viewpoints.

More from Alvin Toffler

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.
Alvin TofflerRead
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.
Alvin TofflerRead
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 TofflerRead
The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.
Alvin TofflerRead
If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.
Alvin TofflerRead
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 TofflerRead

Similar quotes

The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species.
Chris HedgesRead
Christian, n.: one who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor.
Ambrose BierceRead
Surely, life is not merely a job, an occupation; life is something extraordinarily wide and profound, it is a great mystery, a vast realm in which we function as human beings.
Jiddu KrishnamurtiRead
If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
I shall not want Honor in Heaven For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.
T. S. EliotRead
Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.
Jodi PicoultRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.