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An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
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
Trained
Genius
Stay
Interesting
Need
Needs
Enamored
Never
Ruts
Amateur
More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin
Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future
Daniel J. Boorstin
When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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
The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
Daniel J. Boorstin
The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.
Daniel J. Boorstin