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Alvin Toffler Biography

Alvin Toffler (October 4, 1928 – June 27, 2016) was an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide.

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Alvin Toffler Quotes

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.

Organization, Mass Destruction, Media, Education, Production, Things

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

Real, Anger, Society, Definition, Definitions

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.

Process, Difficult, Producers, Actually, Production

In describing today's accelerating changes, the media fire blips of unrelated information at us. Experts bury us under mountains of narrowly specialized monographs. Popular forecasters present lists of unrelated trends, without any model to show us their interconnections or the forces likely to reverse them. As a result, change itself comes to be seen as anarchic, even lunatic.

Change, Changes, Communication, Fire, Specialized, Unrelated

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

Arrival, Change Management, Disorientation, Dizzying, Future, Shock

The great growling engine of change - technology.

Change, Engine, Growling, Technology

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

Sideways, Linear, Backwards, Change, Forwards

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

Facts, Ifs, Production, Right, Substitutes

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.

Assassins, Defending, Exists, Grounds, Ideas, Suggestions

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.

Anchors, Avert, Impact, Religion, Roots

You cannot get a new economy without a new society.

Economy, Society

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.

Age, Appendage, Criticism, Criticisms, Wife, Years

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

Adaptable, Avert, Capable, Individual, Shock

Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically. Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a new super-machine.

Arithmetically, Existing, Machine, Numbers, Technology, Together

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.

Running, People, Imagination, Imbecile, Participation, Society

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.

Breathing, Change, Experience, Look, Perspective

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

Wisdom, Data, Thought Provoking, Quantitative, Judgment, Distrust

Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.

Against, Fiction, Future, Shock, Sovereign

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.

Education, Teaching, Illiterate Person, Know, Future, Illiterate

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

Change, Future, Life, Merely, Spiritual

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