Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes & Sayings

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Our American past always speaks to us with two voices: the voice of the past, and the voice of the present. We are always asking two quite different questions. Historians reading the words of John Winthrop usually ask, What did they mean to him? Citizens ask, What do they mean to us? Historians are trained to seek the original meaning; all of us want to know the present meaning. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well. — Daniel J. Boorstin

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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.' — Daniel J. Boorstin

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter. — Daniel J. Boorstin

American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

As you make your bed, so you must lie in it. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion. — Daniel J. Boorstin

America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now ... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality. — Daniel J. Boorstin

When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Nothing is really real unless it happens on television. — Daniel J. Boorstin

While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

There is no disinfectant like success. — Daniel J. Boorstin

In fast-moving, progress-conscious America, the consumer expects to be dizzied by progress. If he could completely understand advertising jargon he would be badly disappointed. The half-intelligibility which we expect, or even hope, to find in the latest product language personally reassures each of us that progress is being made: that the pace exceeds our ability to follow. — Daniel J. Boorstin

We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus — Daniel J. Boorstin

Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.
Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life. — Daniel J. Boorstin

In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. — Daniel J. Boorstin

History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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!' — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery — Daniel J. Boorstin

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The star is the ultimate American verification of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. His mere existence proves the perfectability of any man or woman. Oh wonderful pliability of human nature, in a society where anyone can become a celebrity! And where any celebrity ... may become a star! — Daniel J. Boorstin

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? — Daniel J. Boorstin

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early. — Daniel J. Boorstin

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before ... We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy ... to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. 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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know. — Daniel J. Boorstin

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact - even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I write to discover what I think — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Beware of charisma ... Representative Men; was Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1850 phrase for the great men in a democracy ... Is there some common quality among these Representative Men who have been most successful as our leaders? I call it the need to be authentic-or, as our dictionaries tell us, conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance or belief. While the charismatic has an uncanny outside source of strength, the authentic is strong because he is what he seems to be. — Daniel J. Boorstin

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services — Daniel J. Boorstin

Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature; the celebrity reveals the possibilities of the media. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension. — Daniel J. Boorstin

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event. — Daniel J. Boorstin

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous. — Daniel J. Boorstin