Future Shock Quotes

“Science fiction is held in low regard as a branch of literature, and perhaps it deserves this critical contempt. But if we view it as a kind of sociology of the future, rather than as literature, science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they can lead young minds through an imaginative exploration of the jungle of political, social, psychological, and ethical issues that will confront these children as adults.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. 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. It is no longer resources that limit decisions, it is the decision that makes the resources.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“We are moving swiftly into the era of the temporary product, made by temporary methods, to serve temporary needs.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“To survive, to avert what we have termed future shock, the individual must become infinitely more adaptable and capable than ever before. He must search out totally new ways to anchor himself, for all the old roots—religion, nation, community, family, or profession— are now shaking under the hurricane impact of the accelerative thrust. Before he can do so, however, he must understand in greater detail how the effects of acceleration penetrate his personal life, creep into his behavior and alter the quality of existence. He must, in other words, understand transience.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“Theories do not have to be “right” to be enormously useful. Even error has its uses.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“Behind such prodigious economic facts lies that great, growling engine of change—technology.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“Jean Fourastié, the French planner and social philosopher, has declared that “Nothing will be less industrial than the civilization born of the industrial revolution.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“Indeed, not only do contemporary events radiate instantaneously—now we can be said to be feeling the impact of all past events in a new way. For the past is doubling back on us. We are caught in what might be called a “time skip.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“This, when it happens (and it is on the cards that it will, somewhere, soon) will be indeterminacy raised to a new power: no permanent monumental interior space or heroic silhouette against the sky will survive for posterity…”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“They still think of permanence as normal, a hangover from the Newtonian view of the universe.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“What Mattel did not announce was that by trading in her old doll for a technologically improved model, the little girl of today, citizen of tomorrow’s super-industrial world, would learn a fundamental lesson about the new society: that man’s relationships with things are increasingly temporary.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“These five relationships—plus time—form the fabric of social experience. This is why, as suggested earlier, things, places, people, organizations and ideas are the basic components of all situations.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“People who are used to a speeded-up urban life…can’t take it for long in the rural South. That’s why people are always driving somewhere for no particular reason. Traveling is the drug of The Movement.” Seemingly aimless, this driving about is a compensation mechanism. Understanding the powerful attraction that a certain pace of life can exert on the individual helps explain much otherwise inexplicable or “aimless” behavior.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“For while we tend to focus on only one situation at a time, the increased rate at which situations flow past us vastly complicates the entire structure of life, multiplying the number of roles we must play and the number of choices we are forced to make. This, in turn, accounts for the choking sense of complexity about contemporary life.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“Sir Leon Bagrit, the British computer manufacturer, insists that automation by itself represents “the greatest change in the whole history of mankind.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“We shall find it increasingly difficult to understand our personal and public problems without making use of the future as an intellectual tool.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“a coherent image of the future can also shower us with valuable insights into today.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“William Ogburn, with his celebrated theory of cultural lag, pointed out how social stresses arise out of the uneven rates of change in different sectors of society. The concept of future shock—and the theory of adaptation that derives from it—strongly suggests that there must be balance, not merely between rates of change in different sectors, but between the pace of environmental change and the limited pace of human response. For future shock grows out of the increasing lag between the two.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

“Future shock will not be found in Index Medicus or in any listing of psychological abnormalities. Yet, unless intelligent steps are taken to combat it, millions of human beings will find themselves increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal rationally with their environments. The malaise, mass neurosis, irrationality, and free-floating violence already apparent in contemporary life are merely a foretaste of what may lie ahead unless we come to understand and treat this disease. Future shock is a time phenomenon, a product of the greatly accelerated rate of change in society. It arises from the superimposition of a new culture on an old one. It is culture shock in one’s own society. But its impact is far worse. For most Peace Corps men, in fact most travelers, have the comforting knowledge that the culture they left behind will be there to return to. The victim of future shock does not. Take an individual out of his own culture and set him down suddenly in an environment sharply different from his own, with a different set of cues to react to—different conceptions of time, space, work, love, religion, sex, and everything else—then cut him off from any hope of retreat to a more familiar social landscape, and the dislocation he suffers is doubly severe. Moreover, if this new culture is itself in constant turmoil, and if—worse yet—its values are incessantly changing, the sense of disorientation will be still further intensified. Given few clues as to what kind of behavior is rational under the radically new circumstances, the victim may well become a hazard to himself and others. Now imagine not merely an individual but an entire society, an entire generation—including its weakest, least intelligent, and most irrational members—suddenly transported into this new world. The result is mass disorientation, future shock on a grand scale. This is the prospect that man now faces. Change is avalanching upon our heads and most people are grotesquely unprepared to cope with it.”
― Alvin Toffler, Future Shock