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I write to discover what I think.

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
Discover
Write
Writing
Think
Thinking

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

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The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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
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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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
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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
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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
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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
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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
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We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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