Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes (33 Quotes)



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



    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."


    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.

    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.

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

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

    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.

    A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.

    Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.


    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.

    The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.

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

    Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.


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

    A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

    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.



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

    I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.

    Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

    The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.


    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.


    More Daniel J. Boorstin Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Wisdom & Knowledge - Education - World - Celebrities - Product - America - Life - Computers & Technology - Books - Experience - Resource - Fool - Crime - People - Travel - Change - Name - Teachers - Secrets - View All Daniel J. Boorstin Quotations

    Related Authors


    Lord Acton - Will Durant - Tacitus - Robert Conquest - James Mill - Iris Chang - Herodotus - Henry Adams - Hannah Arendt - George Bancroft


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections