Alvin Toffler Quotes

The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.

Loneliness is not a problem in traditional societies. People spend their lives in or near the place where they were born, and they remain surrounded by relatives and childhood companions.

So it is that Lonely Places attract as many lonely people as they produce, and the loneliness we see in them is partly in ourselves.

How does one keep from "growing old inside"? Surely only in community. The only way to make friends with time is to stay friends with people.... Taking community seriously not only gives us the companionship we need, it also relieves us of the notion that we are indispensable.

The best of community does give one a deep sense of belonging and well-being; and in that sense community takes away loneliness.

More and more of us live segmented, compartmentalized lives. This isn't natural. For millions of years, our forebears knew everyone around them and everyone knew them.

Loneliness is proof that your innate search for connection is intact.

I've been in Los Angeles for a while, and the kind of psychological connection that one makes to people, it just doesn't happen out here.

Absolutely lonely people have few personal interactions of any kind.

I just really like people, and being a freelancer can be lonely during the day, when you're at home trying to write anything you can. 'Flight Of The Conchords' was so wonderful because I had a family for two years.

I had family and friends back home. Just because I could potentially feel alone in Los Angeles, that didn't mean I was alone.

We can all understand that feeling of being alone in the world trying to find ways to not be alone.

My mother told me once that we can't survive alone, but even if we could, we wouldn't want to. Without a faction we have no purpose and no reason to live.

It's always nice when two people who don't got no one else find each other as friends.

If you're feeling abandoned by the world, interact with anyone you can.

The trouble is not really in being alone, it's being lonely. One can be lonely in the midst of a crowd, don't you think?

Strangers are an endangered species.

There are these people who keep taking you in and feeding you and loving you and making the world a tiny bit safer than it feels. People have community and family, but existentially we are deeply isolated.

When I went home, my family became a little lonely family because it was just me and my mom. Part of my longing to go back to work was wanting to be surrounded by these people who were teaching me things and drinking bad coffee at three in the morning while we were lying around in a bikini in the winter. Somehow it just felt like real life. It felt more like real life than my life.

The worst thing someone gets is isolated. Isolation is the darkest part of any condition. You can live with almost any condition if you're living within a community of people who can share a common understanding. We create these communities from women who share common conditions, and those mothers carry each other through.

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about “Eleanor Rigby.” It’s true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

There is a growing sense in America that being disconnected is not good. And there's also some people that are staying in their silos and not coming out, but we have to pull them out, and we have to pull ourselves together at some point, I think.

People are longing to rediscover true community. We have had enough of loneliness, independence and competition.

Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.

The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.