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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

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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
Agency
Function
Travel
Natives
Used
Agencies
World
Traveler
Encounter
Encounters
Prevent

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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.
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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.
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The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.
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Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
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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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American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.
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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
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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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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.
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The fog of information can drive out 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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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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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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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.
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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.
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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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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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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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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.
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The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
Daniel J. Boorstin