Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
Biographer
Historian
Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Reading
Exclusively
Known
Primarily
Best
Celebrity
Wells
Star
Book
Among
Well
System
Sometimes
Books
Seller
World
Stars
Sellers
More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
Daniel J. Boorstin
The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
Daniel J. Boorstin
American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.
Daniel J. Boorstin
The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
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
Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
Daniel J. Boorstin
I write to discover what I think.
Daniel J. Boorstin
As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
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
I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
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
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
Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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
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
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
