Top 89 Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

#1. Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #20304
#2. While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #32092
#3. The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #46206
#4. The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #122744
#5. The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #139956
#6. The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #141746
#7. A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #155946
#8. An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #183717
#9. The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #222528
#10. God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #222890
#11. More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #253565
#12. There's something beautifully soothing about a fact - even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #254152
#13. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #310498
#14. The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #349200
#15. As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #359035
#16. The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #374530
#17. The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #379215
#18. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #398586
#19. Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A "best seller" is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #413396
#20. [The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #465727
#21. In America, communities existed before governments. There were many groups of people with a common sense of purpose and a feeling of duty to one another before there were political institutions.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #475299
#22. Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #483440
#23. Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #483752
#24. Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #499143
#25. The star is the ultimate American verification of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. His mere existence proves the perfectability of any man or woman. Oh wonderful pliability of human nature, in a society where anyone can become a celebrity! And where any celebrity ... may become a star!

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #555837
#26. It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #573431
#27. While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #575460
#28. There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #610183
#29. [Reading is like] the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #625014
#30. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #627647
#31. The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #640386
#32. I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #642182
#33. The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #665267
#34. Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #669297
#35. Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #671249
#36. There is no disinfectant like success.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #686536
#37. What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #696128
#38. An image is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #725318
#39. The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #768485
#40. I write to discover what I think

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #784837
#41. In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #807221
#42. The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #808255
#43. The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #832452
#44. In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #848843
#45. A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #854846
#46. The mind is a vagrant thing ... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #857773
#47. As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #860918
#48. Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #865547
#49. Destruction is easy for humans but creation is too difficult.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #879224
#50. Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #912343
#51. If our knowledge is, as I believe, only an island in an infinite sea of ignorance, how can we in our short lifetime find satisfaction in exploring our little island? How can we persuade ourselves to be exhilarated by our meager knowledge and yet not be discouraged by the ocean vistas?

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #930376
#52. A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1021062
#53. Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet - which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which would give our planet a special character.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1032846
#54. By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1034419
#55. Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1108562
#56. The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1133650
#57. Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1148781
#58. Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1162417
#59. We read advertisements ... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1176144
#60. Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1179736
#61. Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1207850
#62. What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1271679
#63. The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1272901
#64. American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1289555
#65. The messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1312302
#66. When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington's birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1316643
#67. A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off each other.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1340783
#68. While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1380581
#69. History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1431124
#70. Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1434766
#71. Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1441945
#72. The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1485252
#73. A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1505263
#74. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1526293
#75. Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1546587
#76. Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined - even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness - to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1562483
#77. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1568753
#78. When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1569119
#79. The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1582644
#80. Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1642514
#81. Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1649283
#82. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.'

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1684778
#83. We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1733315
#84. I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1745553
#85. We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1845311
#86. Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1857827
#87. Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1859668
#88. The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature; the celebrity reveals the possibilities of the media.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1866566
#89. There is no known device for artistic contraception.

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Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes #1868302

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