Daniel J. Boorstin's Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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.

As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.

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

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

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

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.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.

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

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

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.

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

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

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