Quote

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Find
Exaggerating
World
Remake
Remakes
Exaggeration
Step
Short
Steps
Power

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

Image
The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
There is no disinfectant like success.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
In the small town each citizen had done something in his own way to build the community. The town booster had a vision of the future which he tried to fulfill. The suburb dweller by contrast started with the future
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
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
Image
Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Image
Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
Daniel J. Boorstin