Alvin Toffler

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

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

“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 (1928-2016)

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

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

“Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.”

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

“Our moral responsibility is not to stop the future, but to shape it...to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition.”

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

“It does little good to forecast the future of semiconductors or energy, or the future of the family (even one's own family), if the forecast springs from the premise that everything else will remain unchanged. For nothing will remain unchanged. The future is fluid, not frozen. It is constructed by our shifting and changing daily decisions, and each event influences all others.”

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

“The recognition that no knowledge can be complete, no metaphor entire, is itself humanizing. It counteracts fanaticism. It grants even to adversaries the possibility of partial truth, and to oneself the possibility of error.”

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

“A library is a hospital for the mind.”

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

“real revolutions replace institutions as well as technologies. And they do more: They break down and reorganize what social psychologists call the role structure of society.”

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

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

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

"Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur."

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

"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."

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

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

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

"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."

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

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

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

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

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

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.'

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

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

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

"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."

—Alvin Toffler (1928-2016)

"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 (1928-2016)