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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.

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
Ignorance
Progress
Knowledge
History
Confirms
Science
Aphorism
Great
Menace
Western
Illusion

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

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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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We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.
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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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Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.
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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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 messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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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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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
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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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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus
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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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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
Daniel J. Boorstin