Alvin Toffler

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

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

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

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

I work virtually every waking hour.

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.

People of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice but from a paralysing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.

We futurists have a magic button. We follow every statement about a failed forecast with 'yet.'

No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.

One of the more fantastic possibilities is that man will be able to make biological carbon copies of himself.

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

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

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.

Technology feeds on itself. Technology makes more technology possible.

We must search out totally new ways to anchor ourselves, for all the old roots religion, nation, community, family, or profession are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust.

Knowledge is the most democratic source of power.

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

Nobody knows the future with certainty. We can, however, identify ongoing patterns of change.

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.