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
Topics: Shopping
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Example
The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us, we serve it. If we have trouble striding toward it, we assume the matter is with us, and not the ideal.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Ideals
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Technology
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Freedom
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
Topics: Exaggeration
The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Knowledge, Romance
There’s something beautifully soothing about a fact – even (or perhaps especially) if we’re not sure what it means.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Reality
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
Topics: Media
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Obstacles, Ignorance, Discovery
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
Topics: Conceit, Vanity
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.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension. Dissent (which come from the Latin, dis and sentire) means originally to feel apart from others. People who disagree have an argument, but people who dissent have a quarrel. People may disagree and both may count themselves in the majority. But a person who dissents is by definition in a minority. A liberal society thrives on disagreement but is killed by dissension. Disagreement is the life blood of democracy, dissension is its cancer.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
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
Topics: Heroes/Heroism
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
Topics: Aspirations, Dreams
The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Criminals, Crime
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
Topics: Travel, Tourism
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. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Knowledge
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
Topics: Journalists, Journalism
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
Topics: God
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
Topics: Advertising
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
A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera—and himself.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Photography
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
Topics: Culture
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
Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Ignorance, Education, Learning
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
Topics: America
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
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- William Graham Sumner American Polymath
- James Truslow Adams American Historian
- James Harvey Robinson American Historian
- John Kotter American Management Consultant
- David McCullough American Historian
- Henry Adams American Historian
- Theodore H. White American Journalist
- Randy Pausch American Computer Scientist
- Jacques Barzun American Cultural Historian
- Will Durant American Historian
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