Alvin Toffler Quotes - Page 2

Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

Industrial vomit...fills our skies and seas. Pesticides and herbicides filter into our foods. Twisted automobile carcasses, aluminum cans, non-returnable glass bottles and synthetic plastics form immense middens in our midst as more and more of our detritus resists decay. We do not even begin to know what to do with our radioactive wastes - whether to pump them into the earth, shoot them into outer space, or pour them into the oceans. Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.

You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.

The Second Wave Society is industrial and based on mass production, mass distribution, mass consumption, mass education, mass media, mass recreation, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. You combine those things with standardization, centralization, concentration, and synchronization, and you wind up with a style of organization we call bureaucracy.

One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.

The 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.

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.

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.

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

Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.

Change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.

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

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

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.

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.

Never in history has distance meant less.

Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.

The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education.

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.

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.

Knowledge is promiscuous. It mates and gives birth to more knowledge.

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.