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
technology people favelas
We will only keep people from fleeing the countryside into urban favelas, villas miseries, shantytowns and squatter villages when the productivity gap is closed between what brute labor on the soil can accomplish and what advanced technology makes possible today - and will make possible tomorrow.
jobs play people
Designer's derive their rewards from 'inner standards of excellence, from the intrinsic satisfaction of their tasks. They are committed to the task, not the job. To their standards, not their boss.' So whereas most people divide their lives between time spent earning money and time spent spending it, designers generally lead a seamless existence in which work and play are synonymous. As Milanese designer Richard Sapper put it: "I never work-all the time."
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.
running people imagination
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.
writing editors errors
Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
mind library libraries-and-reading
A library is a hospital for the mind.” - Anonymous
years wife age
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.
pace faster cycles
If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.
change girl boys
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
running emotional data
Society needs people who...know how to be compassionate and honest...Societ y needs all kinds of skills that are not just cognitive; they're emotional, they're affectional. You can't run the society on data and computers alone.
change limits humans
There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.
ideas assassins matter
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.
future men data
Rational behavior ... depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least a fair success, the outcome of his own actions. To do this, he must be able to predict how the environment will respond to his acts. Sanity, itself, thus hinges on man's ability to predict his immediate, personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment.
country civilization appreciate
Many countries today have begun the transition from an industrial wealth system and civilization to a knowledge-based system - without appreciating that a new wealth system is impossible without a corresponding new way of life.