Alvin Toffler Quotes

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Alvin Toffler

Profession : Author

Birth : October 4, 1928

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.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

The great growling engine of change - technology.

Alvin Toffler

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

Alvin Toffler

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

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.

Alvin Toffler

Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.

Alvin Toffler

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.

Alvin Toffler

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

Alvin Toffler

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

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

Alvin Toffler

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

Alvin Toffler

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

Alvin Toffler

We futurists have a magic button. We follow every statement about a failed forecast with 'yet.'

Alvin Toffler

Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.

Alvin Toffler

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 Toffler

I work virtually every waking hour.

Alvin Toffler

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.

Alvin Toffler

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