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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.

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
Made
Contain
World
Celebrity
Emptiness
Author
Biggest
Dignity
Seller
Atheism
Agnosticism
Best
Sellers

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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.
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When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.
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The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
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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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The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
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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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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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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!'
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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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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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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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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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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.
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I write to discover what I think.
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The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise.
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Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God.
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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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The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
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