Top 60 Alvin Toffler Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Change Quotes, Learning Quotes

2. “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

3. “If you don’t have a strategy, you’re part of someone else’s strategy.”

— Alvin Toffler

4. “I work virtually every waking hour.”

— Alvin Toffler

5. “Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.”

— Alvin Toffler

Featured in: Future Quotes

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

— Alvin Toffler

7. “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

8. “The future always comes too fast and in the wrong order.”

— Alvin Toffler

9. “It is always easier to talk about change than to make it.”

— Alvin Toffler

10. “Change is non-linear and can go backwards, forwards and sideways.”

— Alvin Toffler

11. “The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday’s success.”

— Alvin Toffler

12. “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.”

— Alvin Toffler

13. “Information overload will lead to ‘future shock syndrome’ as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances.”

— Alvin Toffler

14. “Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.”

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

16. “The great growling engine of change – technology.”

— Alvin Toffler

17. “Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.”

— Alvin Toffler

18. “Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.”

— Alvin Toffler

19. “Much education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth.”

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

21. “Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.”

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

23. “Humanity faces a quantum leap forward. It faces the deepest social upheaval and creative restructuring of all time. Without clearly recognizing it, we are engaged in building a remarkable new civilization from the ground up. This is the meaning of the Third Wave.”

— Alvin Toffler

24. “The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.”

— Alvin Toffler

25. “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

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

— Alvin Toffler

27. “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

28. “Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.”

— Alvin Toffler

29. “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

30. “A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.”

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

32. “Knowledge is promiscuous. It mates and gives birth to more knowledge.”

— Alvin Toffler

33. “One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split -up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.”

— Alvin Toffler

34. “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

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

— Alvin Toffler

36. “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

37. “We need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies – images of potential tomorrows.”

— Alvin Toffler

38. “You cannot get a new economy without a new society.”

— Alvin Toffler

39. “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

40. “The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow’s worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.”

— Alvin Toffler

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

46. “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

47. “Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.”

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler

49. “The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together.”

— Alvin Toffler

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

— Alvin Toffler