115 Quotes by Alvin Toffler

It would be a mistake to assume that the present day educational system is unchanging. On the contrary, it is undergoing rapid change. But much of this change is no more than an attempt to refine the existent machinery, making it ever more efficient in pursuit of obsolete goals.

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.

Never in history has distance meant less.

If you have the right knowledge you can substitute it for all the other facts of production

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.

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.

The control of knowledge is the crux of tomorrow's worldwide struggle for power in every human institution.

Knowledge is promiscuous. It mates and gives birth to more knowledge.

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.