ALVIN TOFFLER

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

Man has a limited biological capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the capacity is in future shock.

The great growling engine of change - technology.

The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

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.

It is better to err on the side of daring than the side of caution.

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.

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.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.

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

I work virtually every waking hour.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

Anyone nit-picking enough to write a letter of correction to an editor doubtless deserves the error that provoked it.

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

The biggest tragedy I had was the loss of my daughter from neuromuscular disease in 2000, at age 46.

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.

My wife and I, unlike many intellectuals, spent five years working on assembly lines. We came to fully understand the criticisms of the industrial age, in which you are an appendage of a machine that sets the pace.

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.

Parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur.

Most managers were trained to be the thing they most despise - bureaucrats.

Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.

People need islands of stability during periods of rapid change.

The wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.

Asians love technology. They see it as the path to a good life. This is not so in Europe where there is much skepticism about technology—maybe because of Nazi Germany and its use of technology.