D Boorstin Quotes & Sayings

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

[Reading is like] the sex act - done privately, and often in bed. — 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

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

It's all about the parking — Jon 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

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

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises. — 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

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

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory. — 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

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