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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.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
Biographer
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Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
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Whether
Twentieth
Difficult
Vice
Best
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Come
Bible
Great
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Think
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Century
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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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
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A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.
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We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
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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.
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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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The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
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Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
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Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
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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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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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Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
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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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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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When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
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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?
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There is no disinfectant like success.
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