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Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery

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
Knowledge
History
Illusions
Human
Proven
Humans
Principal
Obstacles
Discovery
Illusion
Ignorance

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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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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
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It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.
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I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
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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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The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media.
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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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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 messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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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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We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
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But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.
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The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.
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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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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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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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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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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