Alvin Toffler
Alvin Toffler
Alvin Tofflerwas an American writer and futurist, known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth4 October 1928
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
mother daughter loss
The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.
communication media fire
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.
loneliness being-alone giving
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.
waking hours
I work virtually every waking hour.
expression political economic
Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.
civilization challenges criticism
By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
kings cutting knights
Human beings were held accountable long before there were corporate bureaucracies. If the knight didn't deliver, the king cut off his head.
individual shock avert
To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.
mistake educational goal
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.
people vision experts
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.
distance
Never in history has distance meant less.
facts substitutes productions
If you have the right knowledge you can substitute it for all the other facts of production
civilization creative humanity
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.
process producers difficult
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.