Alvin Toffler Quotes

Maybe this is just me, but as time goes by, I'm more bewildered by modernity. It gets more unfathomable with every passing year.

As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn't necessarily be good.

Everything we have learned in the last 15,000 years will be swept away in the coming years…. The next hundred years will produce more changes than have taken place in the last 100,000 years. Indeed, the last 100 years have produced more change than the last 100,000 years.

Distance is collapsing in our world. People all over the world are having difficulty imagining their future, and their governments just tell them about the virtues of the past.

For young people today things move so fast there is no problem of adjustment. Before you can adjust to A, B has appeared leading C by the hand, and with D in the distance.

Everything is happening too fast for me to process it.

Future shock is a sickness which comes from too much change in too short a time. It's the feeling that nothing is permanent anymore.

We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.

Events often move faster than our ability to comprehend them.

Societies faced with bewildering changes, and feeling old certainties threatened, are open to new cults.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

Do you believe that life today is the same as it was 10 centuries ago? This tremendous change was produced by the West. Who else produced it?

A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world.

We live in a world changing so rapidly that what we mean frequently by common sense is doing the thing that would have been right last year.

The speed of change today is faster than the human psyche seems able to handle, and it's increasingly difficult to reconcile the rhythms of our personal lives with the rapidity of a twenty-four-hour news cycle.

Access to information, to music or any kind of culture, is getting faster and faster and more streamlined. At each juncture, people are thrown into tumult and have to adapt or die.

The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.

I think technology and smartphones created a huge paradigm shift that we can't fully comprehend, and I think in a lot of ways things are changing faster than we can really process.

Society is changing constantly, and changing faster than we think.

Has worrying about tomorrow every changed it?

To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before.

Modern life is confusing no "Ms take" about it.

We live in an age where the rate of change has been colossal. Colossal. Almost every week there's some transformation of some kind, whether technological or political or scientific, whatever. And I think it's bewildering to human beings to live in a time when they can't take anything as fixed - when everything is shifting and changing all the time.

The roster that we have today may change tomorrow. It is what it is for right now.

Tomorrow is going to be different than yesterday, it's going to be a lot different.