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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

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
Started
Repulsion
Almost
Comparing
Talk
Uniqueness
Felt
Ended
America
Attraction
Country
Compare
Always
Toward
Europe
Oedipus

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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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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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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. 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.
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We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
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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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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.
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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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When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
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Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A best seller is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.
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The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -movement through space -provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -perhaps one of the secret terrors -of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.
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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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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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Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
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