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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!'

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
Reading
Remark
Today
Remarks
Would
Nowadays
Time
Newspaper
World
Dull
Newspapers
Reader
Says
Unexciting

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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 force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
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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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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
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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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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
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Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
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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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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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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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Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus
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The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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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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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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An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
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