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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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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
Believe
Week
Naturally
Tourist
Life
Modern
Adventure
Strangeness
World
American
Lifetime
Pseudo
Experience
Expect
Tourism
Two
Offers
Tourists
Come
Travel
Familiarity

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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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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
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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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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 computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.
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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.
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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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We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
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There is no disinfectant like success.
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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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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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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Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
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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.
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The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
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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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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.
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