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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

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Alvin Toffler
Age: 87 †
Born: 1928
Born: October 4
Died: 2016
Died: June 27
Futures Studies
Futurist
Journalist
Pedagogue
Science Fiction Writer
Sociologist
Writer
New York City
New York
True
Relive
Change
Compelled
Endure
Worse
Shall
Future
Learn
History

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In the year 2000 an illiterate person will not be someone who can't read or write, but someone who is not able to learn, unlearn and learn again.
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Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.
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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.
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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.
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Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
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You can use all the quantitative data you can get, but you still have to distrust it and use your own intelligence and judgment.
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A library is a hospital for the mind.” - Anonymous
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Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.
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Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.
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Future shock is the disorientation that affects an individual, a corporation, or a country when he or it is overwhelmed by change and the prospect of change ... we are in collision with tomorrow.
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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.
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By challenging anthropocentricism and temporal provincialism, science fiction throws open the whole of civilization and its premises to constructive criticism.
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Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.
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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.
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It is always easier to talk about change than to make it.
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The political technology of the Industrial age is no longer appropriate technology for the new civilization taking form around us. Our politics are obsolete.
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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.
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Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.
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Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.
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A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.
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