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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.

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
Known
Primarily
Best
Celebrity
Wells
Star
Book
Among
Well
System
Sometimes
Books
Seller
World
Stars
Sellers
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Exclusively

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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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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.
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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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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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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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Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.
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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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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 celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
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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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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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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
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There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
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There is no disinfectant like success.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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 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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We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
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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