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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
Come
Travel
Familiarity
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

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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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We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
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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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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 force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
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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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The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media.
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More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
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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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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
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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 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.
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A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
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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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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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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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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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