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.
Alvin TofflerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Toffler reflects on the dehumanizing aspects of industrial work and how personal experience grants deeper understanding.
In this quote, Alvin Toffler emphasizes the significance of personal experience in grasping the critiques of industrialization. By spending years working on assembly lines, he and his wife gained firsthand insight into the mechanized and often alienating nature of such labor, highlighting how individuals can become mere extensions of machines rather than fulfilled workers. This understanding stands in contrast to the perspectives held by those who criticize the system without experiencing it directly.
Themes
IndustrializationExperienceCriticismWorkMachines
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of understanding the workforce, one could cite this quote to emphasize the value of firsthand experience in shaping viewpoints.
More from Alvin Toffler
All quotes →Any decent society must generate a feeling of community. Community offsets_x000D_ _x000D_ loneliness. It gives people a vitally necessary sense of belonging. Yet today_x000D_ _x000D_ the institutions on which community depends are crumbling in all the_x000D_ _x000D_ techno-societies. The result is a spreading plague of loneliness.
Alvin TofflerRead
Future shock is the disorientation that affects an individual, a corporation, or a country when he or it is overwhelmed by change and the prospect of change ... we are in collision with tomorrow.
Alvin TofflerRead
The Law of Raspberry Jam: the wider any culture is spread, the thinner it gets.
Alvin TofflerRead
If you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.
Alvin TofflerRead
To think that the new economy is over is like somebody in London in 1830 saying the entire industrial revolution is over because some textile manufacturers in Manchester went broke.
Alvin TofflerRead
Similar quotes
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing _x000D_ That is more than your own. _x000D_ Let it brush your cheeks _x000D_ As it divides and rejoins behind you. _x000D_ _x000D_ The trees you planted in childhood have grown _x000D_ Too heavy. You cannot bring them along. _x000D_ Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
Rainer Maria RilkeRead
But I also think all of the great stories in literature deal with loneliness. Sometimes it's by way of heartbreak, sometimes it's by way of injustice, sometimes it's by way of fate. There's an infinite number of ways to examine it.
Tom HanksRead
Even two of humanity's most intimate possessions - a sense of self and a body image - are fluid, highly modifiable creations of the brain's mischievous deployment of electricity and a handful of chemicals. They both can change or be changed on less than a second's notice.
Miguel NicolelisRead
There is a name hidden in the shadow of my soul, where I read it night and day and no other eye sees it.
Alphonse De LamartineRead
Americans do not want to think that there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say 'fascism' or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say 'no' because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that we are no longer in.
Timothy D. SnyderRead
If you take 10,000 chimpanzees and cram them together into Wembley Stadium or the Houses of Parliament, you will get chaos. But if you take 10,000 people who have never met before, they can co-operate and create amazing things.
Yuval Noah HarariRead