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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
Needed
Publicity
Public
Nowadays
Eye
Secretary
Keep
Barriers
Men
Properly
Presses
Press
Formerly
Private
Barrier

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

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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.
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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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Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.
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The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.
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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
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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Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
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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
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I write to discover what I think.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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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We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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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