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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.

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
Computer
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Unimagined
Question
Unwelcome
Answers
Resource
Help
Symbol
Helping
Symbols
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Remains
Book
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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 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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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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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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Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
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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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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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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.
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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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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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We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
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The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.
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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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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.
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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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There is no disinfectant like success.
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Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye.
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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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