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Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future.

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
Dizzying
Arrival
Arrivals
Premature
Shock
Brought
Future
Disorientation

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Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.
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Learning is like rowing upstream not to advance is to drop back.” - Chinese proverb
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The next major explosion is going to be when genetics and computers come together. I'm talking about an organic computer - about biological substances that can function like a semiconductor.
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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.
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The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success.
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The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.
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Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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Never in history has distance meant less.
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Freedom of expression is no longer a political nicety, but a precondition for economic competitiveness.
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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.
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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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Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.
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Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.
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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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The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow's worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.
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