Inspirational Quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin (American Historian)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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: Heroes/Heroism, Fame

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
Topics: Travel

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: Dreams, Aspirations

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

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
—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
Topics: Cities

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

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

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

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

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

Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Ignorance, Learning, Education

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Obstacles, Ignorance, Discovery

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

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

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

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: Exploration

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 often that their name is worth more than their services.
—Daniel J. Boorstin
Topics: Fame

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

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

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

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

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

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