Top 91 Boorstin Quotes
#1. The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#2. 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
#3. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#13. What kills leadership growth isn't ignorance, but rather the illusion of knowledge.
Orrin Woodward
#16. 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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#17. A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#18. 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
#19. 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
#21. Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
Daniel J. Boorstin
#23. The mind is a vagrant thing ... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#24. When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#26. The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature; the celebrity reveals the possibilities of the media.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#27. Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#28. Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#29. We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#30. I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#31. We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#32. 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.'
Daniel J. Boorstin
#34. Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#35. The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#36. 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
#37. The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#38. 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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#39. 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
#41. A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#42. 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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#44. Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#45. 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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#46. While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#49. 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
#50. [The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#51. 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
#52. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#57. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#58. There's something beautifully soothing about a fact - even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#64. A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services
Daniel J. Boorstin
#65. 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
#66. The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#67. 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
#69. While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#70. Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#76. The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#77. 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
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#83. 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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#84. 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
#85. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#90. 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
#91. 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
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