Alvin Toffler Quotes

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

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.

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.

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.'

The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success.

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.

If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.

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.

One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.

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.

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.

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.

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.

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.

It is always easier to talk about change than to make it.

Knowledge is knowing... or knowing where to find out.

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.

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

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

Information overload will lead to 'future shock syndrome' as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances.

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

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.

If you don't have a viable strategy, you will be defeated by someone who does.

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

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.