Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

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.'

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

I write to discover what I think.

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

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.

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

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.

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.

The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.

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.

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.

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

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.

As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension.

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye.

destruction is easy for humans but creation is too difficult.

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

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.

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.

Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

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!'

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.

There is no disinfectant like success.

The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.

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.

Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.

When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.

The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.