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.

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.

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

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

I work virtually every waking hour.

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.

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

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.

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.

The great growling engine of change - technology.

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

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.

No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.

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

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.

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

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

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

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

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.