Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
Biographer
Historian
Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Facts
Helped
America
Surprise
Important
Later
World
Mankind
American
Surprises
Simple
Addition
Fact
Prepare
Experience
Surprising

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A best seller is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
Daniel J. Boorstin