Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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
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
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
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.

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

Daniel J. Boorstin
These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story — a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel — movement through space — provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions — perhaps one of the secret terrors — of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

Daniel J. Boorstin
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.

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

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

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

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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
While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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
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
The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.

Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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