Alvin Toffler Quotes

The riches of the rich are not the cause of the poverty of anybody; the process that makes some people rich is, on the contrary, the corollary of the process that improves many peoples want satisfaction. The entrepreneurs, the capitalists and the technologists prosper as far as they succeed in best supplying the consumers.

Luddism is no longer with us, but today we seem to be overtaken by its opposite, the inevitability of technological change coupled with the blind belief in capitalism's ability to provide us with all we need.

Isn't it strange that as technology advances, the quality of life frequently declines.

… only today, or yesterday at the earliest, after the long millenniums of man's life on this planet, has he acquired the technical skill, the command over the forces of nature, the physical power to produce enough and more for all his children upon the face of the earth.

… increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor

Think back to the time when Agriculture was not labor efficient. We have lost all these jobs. But I don't think anyone is too sad about it.

One of the main reasons that we have made so much progress in so many technological areas in recent years is that many people care about those areas.

The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity.

Americans love technology, like jet planes and hot rods and televisions. It's a real conflict between the denial of, "gee this is going to break people out of their regular frames," and "gee it's a new technology I have got to have it."

Urbanization in India is a slow but sure death for her villages and villagers.

Rural poverty happens because people aren't being paid to take adequate care of their places. There's lots of work to do here. And you can't afford to pay anybody to do it! If you depress the price of the products of the place below a certain level, people can't afford to maintain it. And that's the rural dilemma.

Growth in productivity has diverged from growth in the share that working people can expect right across advanced economies, but this trend started earlier and has been more pronounced in the U.S.

As industrial technology advances and enlarges, and in the process assumes greater social, economic, and political force, it carries people away from where they belong by history, culture, deeds, association, and affection.

Until African-Americans and Hispanics can get serious, not just about area studies, which are important, but also about science and technology, they're not going to generate that wealth and that job within those communities. And that has absolutely devastating consequences for the places where people live, for the jobs and for the wealth.

Technology transforms people's lives. From mitigating poverty to simplifying processes, ending corruption to providing better services, Technology is omnipresent. It has become the single-most important instrument of human progress.

Technology evolves faster than people do, faster than biology does.

Information technology has brought people much closer together than ever before, providing a democratizing and mostly stabilizing influence.

In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms.

There are dangers, but only dangers if people don't understand where technology is taking us.

All of the progress that the US has made over the last couple of centuries has come from unemployment. It has come from figuring out how to produce more goods with fewer workers, thereby releasing labor to be more productive in other areas. It has never come about through permanent unemployment, but temporary unemployment, in the process of shifting people from one area to another.

We are using new technologies in meaningful ways. To build our new refinery in 60 percent of the time it took to build our first, we are training 20,000 people in a new generation of welding technology in six months.

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.

I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.

It's easy to kind of say it's the elite that's putting you down. Well, it wasn't really the elite, technology will do that.

The world today is a very different one. Social media, which I use as a way of connecting with people, is something that my father never got to use. I'm not worried about defending my father's legacy. I'm very much worried about what the future holds.