Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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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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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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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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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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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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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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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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Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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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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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.
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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 news leak is a pseudo‑event par excellence. In its origin and growth, the leak illustrates another axiom of the world of pseudo‑events: pseudo‑events produce more pseudo‑events.
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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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The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
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Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
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Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
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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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The image, more interesting than its original, has become the original. The shadow has become the substance.
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Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
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The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
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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.'