Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

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

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

In our world of big names, 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-knowness 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

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Daniel J. Boorstin

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

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

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

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

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.'

Daniel J. Boorstin

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

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

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

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

Daniel J. Boorstin