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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.
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
Press
Formerly
Private
Barrier
Needed
Publicity
Public
Nowadays
Eye
Secretary
Keep
Barriers
Men
Properly
Presses
More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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
The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.
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
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
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
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
The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
History had been man's effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man's ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.
Daniel J. Boorstin
The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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
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
Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15.
Daniel J. Boorstin
