Daniel J. Boorstin
Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension.Collection: Debate
Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension. Dissent (which come from the Latin, dis and sentire) means originally to feel apart from others. People who disagree have an argument, but people who dissent have a quarrel. People may disagree and both may count themselves in the majority. But a person who dissents is by definition in a minority. A liberal society thrives on disagreement but is killed by dissension. Disagreement is the life blood of democracy, dissension is its cancer.Collection: Cancer
While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.Collection: Knowledge
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.Collection: Mother
The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.Collection: Hero
The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.Collection: Travel
The cities of Italy are now deluged with droves of these creatures [tour groups], for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director - now in front, now at the rear, circling them like a sheep dog - and really the process is as like herding as may be.Collection: Dog
There is no disinfectant like success.Collection: Success
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.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Nature
Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.Collection: Worn It
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.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Men
A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.Collection: Train Wrecks
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!'Collection: Reading
Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives- from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango - with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage.Collection: Travel
Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Greatness
There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Christian
The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.Collection: Ocean
The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his name or trademark.Collection: Hero
There is no known device for artistic contraception.Collection: Artistic
No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.Collection: Atheist
Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.Collection: Book
The improved American highway system isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.Collection: Ocean
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.Collection: People
Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God.Collection: Moving
The most important lesson of American history is the promise of the unexpected. None of our ancestors would have imagined settling way over here on this unknown continent. So we must continue to have society that is hospitable to the unexpected, which allows possibilities to develop beyond our own imaginings.Collection: Promise
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.Collection: Practice
The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.Collection: Technology
It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.Collection: Book
Being known primarily for their well-knownness, celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.Collection: Idols
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.Collection: Character
The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.Collection: Thinking
Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.Collection: Land
While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.Collection: Pride
An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.Collection: Interesting
While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.Collection: Miracle
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.Collection: Style
American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.Collection: Civilization
In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.Collection: Bible
When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.Collection: England
We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.Collection: Business
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.Collection: Dream
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?Collection: Art
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.Collection: Character
Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A "best seller" is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Life