Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama.

— Alvin Toffler

Alvin Toffler Quotes

By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.

— Alvin Toffler

It would be a mistake to assume that the present day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals.

— Alvin Toffler

Human beings were held accountable long before there were corporate bureaucracies. If the knight didn’t deliver, the king cut off his head.

— Alvin Toffler

Never in history has distance meant less.

— Alvin Toffler

If you have the right knowledge you can substitute it for all the other facts of production.

— Alvin Toffler

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.

— 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

We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today – and will make possible tomorrow.

— Alvin Toffler

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.

— Alvin Toffler

There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.

— Alvin Toffler

Every generation gets a chance to change the world Pity the nation that won’t listen to your boys and girls Cos the sweetest melody is the one we haven’t heard.

— Alvin Toffler

If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

Education

Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

I work virtually every waking hour.

— Alvin Toffler

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.

— Alvin Toffler

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.

— Alvin Toffler

Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt. They seem blankly unaware that what they are feeling inside themselves is the subjective reflection of a much larger objective crisis: they are acting out an unwitting drama within a drama.

— Alvin Toffler

If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion.

— Alvin Toffler

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