Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes
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Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
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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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The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
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I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
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Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
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By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.
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The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
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A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
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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.'
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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.
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The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.