Quote

Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
Biographer
Historian
Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Privately
Bed
Sex
Reading
Often
Done
Like

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin