Daniel J. Boorstin
The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.Collection: Courage
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.Collection: Wisdom
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.Collection: Computers
A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.Collection: Famous
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Design
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.Collection: Famous
Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.Collection: Time
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.'Collection: Experience
Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.Collection: Learning
As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.Collection: Politics
Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.Collection: Knowledge
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.Collection: Freedom
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
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.
I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
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.
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
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.
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.
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. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.Collection: Atheist
Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.Collection: Flower
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.Collection: Art
The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly irridescent, 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.Collection: Real
The fog of information can drive out knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
The hero is known for achievements; the celebrity for well-knowns. The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature. The celebrity reveals the possibilities of the press and media. Celebrities are people who make news, but heroes are people who make history. Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.Collection: Hero
I write to discover what I think.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Sports
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.Collection: Learning
Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio - empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how - has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. Here at home - within the family, so to speak - our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.Collection: Attitude
The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.Collection: Hero
Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discoveryCollection: Ignorance
The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.Collection: Ignorance
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: People
The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.Collection: Maps
Probably no one of us has the True Religion. But all of us together - if we are allowed to be free - are discovering ways of conversing about the great mysteries. The pretense to know all the answers to the deepest mysteries is, of course, the grossest fraud. And any people who declare a Jihad, a holy war on unbelievers - those who do not share their believers' pretended omniscience - are enemies of thinking men and woman and of civilization. I see religion as only a way of asking unanswerable questions, of sharing the joy of a community of quest, and solacing one another in our ignorance.Collection: War
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.Collection: Hero
The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.Collection: Way
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Sports
More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.Collection: Knowledge
By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.Collection: Reading