Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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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.
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While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
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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.
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Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.
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We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
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Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
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Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.
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Pseudo‑events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence. Perhaps, we come to think, the world’s problems can really be settled by 'statements,' by 'Summit' meetings, by a competition of 'prestige,' by overshadowing images, and by political quiz shows.
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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.
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
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Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
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Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
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The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
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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.
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Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
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The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
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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.
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The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
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Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.