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What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?

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
Well
Democratic
Work
Begin
Especially
Painting
Age
Reproduced
Natural
Stature
Art
Widely
Wells
Measure

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

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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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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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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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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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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.
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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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Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
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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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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 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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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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Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
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Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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.
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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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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media.
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I write to discover what I think.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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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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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