Daniel J. Boorstin > Quotes

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.”
― Daniel Boorstin

“Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“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

“I write to discover what I think”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy...to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.”
― Daniel Boorstin

“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

“We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“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 Boorstin

“A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire good PR.”
― Daniel Boorstin

“[Reading is like] the sex act—done privately, and often in bed.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature; the celebrity reveals the possibilities of the media.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services”
― Daniel J. Boorstin

“Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism - from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us. Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism - the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples. Instead, our peculiar idolatry is one with which the world till now has been unfamiliar... To flood the world with images of ourselves. It is to these images and not the material objects that we are devoted. No wonder that the puzzled world finds this unattractive and calls it by the name of its own old-fashioned vices.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“The shadow has become the substance.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“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 now fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.”
― Daniel Boorstin

“Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.

Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

“While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent. Before the primacy of the image, a salesman or an advertisement would have to describe the attributes of a product in a rational appeal to the intellect. Afterward, it was the mythology of the brand, usually concocted by psychologists, that would sway a consumer’s heart. Likewise, with the rise of the image in politics, the policy platform of a presidential candidate would come to matter less than the ability of his image to convey ineffable or irrelevant values. Though”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“This sense of time, the awareness that countless others have come before and that others will follow in endless generations, distinguishes man from other animals. With this discovery of the meaning of death—that man’s own life is limited—the life of architecture begins. And so begins man the creator’s effort to conquer time.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

“More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself

“The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita—unknown territory.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself

“Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, were men of speculative temperament. What is the world made of? What are the elements and the processes by which the world is transformed? Greek philosophy and science were born together, of the passion to know. The Buddha’s aim was not to know the world or to improve it but to escape its suffering. His whole concern was salvation. It is not easy for us in the West to understand or even name this Buddhist concern. To say that the Buddhists had a “philosophy” would be misleading.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

“The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men’s use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

“Much of what we have been doing to improve the world's opinion of us has had the contrary effect. Audio-visual aids which we have sent over the world are primary aids to the belief in the irrelevance, the arrogance, the rigidity, and the conceit of America. Not because they are poorly made. On the contrary, because they are well made and vividly projected. Not because they are favorable images or unfavorable images, but because they are images.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“We try to make our celebrities stand in for the heroes we no longer have, or for those who have been pushed out of our view... Yet the celebrity is usually nothing greater than a more-publicized version of us. In imitating him, in trying to dress like him, talk like him, look like him, think like him, we are simply imitating ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“They vie with one another in offering attractive, “informative” accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived questions.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America