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

Categorized in : Numbers Together Technology

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

Alvin Toffler

change positive inspirational

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.

Alvin Toffler

future destiny responsibility

By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: 'The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction — how to teach himself. Tomorrow's illiterate will not be the man who can't read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.'

Alvin Toffler

powerful men moving

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.

Alvin Toffler

data emotional running

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

compelled endure change

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.

Alvin Toffler

encouraging inspiring inspirational

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 - at some distant point in the future - will take over the reigns. Yet the fact is that the society is not running itself nicely... because the rest of us need all the energy, brains, imagination and talent that young people can bring to bear down on our difficulties. For society to attempt to solve its desperate problems without the full participation of even very young people is imbecile.

Alvin Toffler

imagination running people

The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success.

Alvin Toffler

survival yesterday firsts

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

stress change time

If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.

Alvin Toffler

ecommerce strategy technology

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

Alvin Toffler

society anger real

The customer will become so integrated into the production process that we will find it more and more difficult to tell just who is actually the consumer and the producer.

Alvin Toffler

difficult producers process

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

responsibility teaching lying

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.

Alvin Toffler

illiterate-person teaching education

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.

Alvin Toffler

trying men civilization

It is always easier to talk about change than to make it.

Alvin Toffler

easier change management

Information is a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor.

Alvin Toffler

substitutes information space

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

Alvin Toffler

hazards progress technology

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

Alvin Toffler

thought-provoking data wisdom

Knowledge is knowing... or knowing where to find out.

Alvin Toffler

knowing reading knowledge