Quote

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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Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
Biographer
Historian
Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Without
Events
Fills
Thrills
Real
Risk
Weeks
Risking
Week
Naturally
Tourist
Believe
Modern
Adventure
Strangeness
Life
American
Lifetime
Pseudo
World
Experience
Expect
Tourism
Two
Offers
Tourists
Come
Travel
Familiarity

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
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The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
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While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.
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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.
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The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
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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.
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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.
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When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
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In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.
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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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We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
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More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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.
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Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
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Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
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The hero is known for achievements the celebrity for well-knowns. The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature. The celebrity reveals the possibilities of the press and media. Celebrities are people who make news, but heroes are people who make history. Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.
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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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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