Alvin Toffler - Future Shock (1970)

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In thinking about the future, it is better to err on the side of daring, than the side of caution.

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

Alvin Toffler
If technology... is to be regarded as a great engine, a mighty accelerator, then knowledge must be regarded as its fuel. And we thus come to the crux of the accelerative process in society, for the engine is being fed a richer and richer fuel every day.

Alvin Toffler
There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb.

Alvin Toffler
[a] great, growling engine of change — technology.

Alvin Toffler
The management of changes is the effort to convert certain possibles into probables, in pursuit of agreed-on preferables.

Alvin Toffler
Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

Alvin Toffler
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.

Alvin Toffler
If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.

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

Alvin Toffler
Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

Alvin Toffler
The rate of change has implications quite apart from, and sometimes more important than, the directions of change.

Alvin Toffler
Each new machine or technique, in a sense, changes all existing machines and techniques, by permitting us to put them together into new combinations. The number of possible combinations rises exponentially as the number of new machines or techniques rises arithmetically. Indeed, each new combination may, itself, be regarded as a new super-machine.

Alvin Toffler
We who explore the future are like those ancient mapmakers, and it is in this spirit that the concept of future shock and the theory of the adaptive range are presented here — not as final word, but as a first approximation of the new realities, filled with danger and promise, created by the accelerative thrust.

Alvin Toffler
Culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with a much more serious malady that might be called 'future shock'. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.

Alvin Toffler
Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.

Alvin Toffler
We need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies - images of potential tomorrows.

Alvin Toffler
No serious futurist deals in 'predictions'. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.

Alvin Toffler
One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition?

Alvin Toffler
Man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.

Alvin Toffler
To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. 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. It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources.

Alvin Toffler
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