Daniel Joseph Boorstin (1914–2004) was an American historian at the University of Chicago, writing on many topics in American history and world history. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in 1975 and served until 1987. He was instrumental in the creation of the Library of Congress Center for the Book.
Source: Wikipedia (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by 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
Topics: Conceit, Vanity
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 hero is known for achievements; the celebrity for well-knowns. The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature. The celebrity reveals the possibilities of the press and media. Celebrities are people who make news, but heroes are people who make history. Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Heroism, Heroes, Time Management, Time
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
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
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
—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.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
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
A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
—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
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
Topics: Fame, Heroes/Heroism
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
Topics: Cities, City Life
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
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
Topics: Travel, Tourism
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
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: Journalism, Journalists
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
A sign of celebrity is often that their name is worth more than their services.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Fame
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
Topics: Art
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: Tourism, Travel
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
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Example
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
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Ignorance, Discovery, Obstacles
The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Criminals, Crime
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
Topics: Journeys, Exploration
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
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Freedom
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
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