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The responsibility for change...lies within us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical.

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
Within
Radical
Lying
Minds
Change
Begin
Must
Lies
Mind
Close
Teaching
Prematurely
Novel
Seemingly
Responsibility
Surprising

More quotes by Alvin Toffler

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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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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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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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Science fiction is the sovereign prophylactic against future shock.
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Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.
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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.
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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.
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Knowledge is knowing... or knowing where to find out.
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To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.
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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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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.
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Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.
Alvin Toffler
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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.
Alvin Toffler
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Never in history has distance meant less.
Alvin Toffler
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Information overload will lead to 'future shock syndrome' as an individual will suffer severe physical and mental disturbances.
Alvin Toffler
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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.
Alvin Toffler
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We need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies - images of potential tomorrows.
Alvin Toffler
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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.
Alvin Toffler
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If industrialism, with its faster pace of life, has accelerated the family cycle, super-industrialism now threatens to smash it altogether.
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Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.
Alvin Toffler