27 Splendid Alvin Toffler Quotes

Alvin Toffler was an American writer and futurist that was mostly known for his talks on modern technologies. Ranging from communication to digital era, Toffler would specifically look into its effects on a global scale among different cultures. With several acclaimed published books under his belt, here is a look at some of the most remarkable Alvin Toffler quotes ever recorded.

“A library is a hospital for the mind.”

“A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”

“If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion.”

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

“In education, we need to begin paying attention to matters routinely ignored. We spend long hours trying to teach a variety of courses on, say, the structure of government or the structure of the amoeba.”

“Individuals need life structure. A life lacking in comprehensible structure is an aimless wreck. The absence of structure breeds breakdown.”

“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.”

“Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.”

"El cambio no es sólo parte esencial de la vida, es la vida" – "Change is not merely necessary to life – it is life.

Alvin Toffler pic.twitter.com/xQO5dbMTCt

— Pedro Moreno (@twpiter) October 16, 2016

“Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back.”

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

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

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

“Rooting about in themselves for the source of their discomfort, they undergo agonies of unnecessary guilt.”

“Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt.”

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

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

“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.”

“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… will take over the reigns.”

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

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

“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.”

Here is a special feature with Alvin Toffler with Big Thinkers as he looks ahead at the science and technology fields of the future.