Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

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

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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
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
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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
The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us, we serve it. If we have trouble striding toward it, we assume the matter is with us, and not the ideal.

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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
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
The science of statistics is the chief instrumentality through which the progress of civilization is now measured and by which its development hereafter will be largely controlled.

Daniel J. Boorstin
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 J. Boorstin
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
Statistics have tended to make facts into norms.

Daniel J. Boorstin
Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

Daniel J. Boorstin
Statistics, which first secured prestige here by a supposedly impartial utterance of stark fact, have enlarged their dominion over the American consciousness by becoming the most powerful statement of the "ought" — displacers of moral imperatives, personal ideals, and unfulfilled objectives.

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude.

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.

Daniel J. Boorstin
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