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

Daniel J. Boorstin

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Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
Biographer
Historian
Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Grows
Knowledge
Dispersion
Another
Diffusion
Used
Increases
Never
Commodity
Contrary
Increase
Simply

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I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
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God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
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But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.
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Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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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.
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Being known primarily for their well-knownness, celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.
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The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.
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The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.
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Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
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American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.
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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.
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There is no disinfectant like success.
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Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
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Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
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Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.
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More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
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Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
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