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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
History
Confirms
Science
Aphorism
Great
Menace
Western
Illusion
Ignorance
Progress
Knowledge

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More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
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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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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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Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
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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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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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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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I write to discover what I think.
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An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.
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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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Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.
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There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'
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The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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.
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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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.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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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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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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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