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While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
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Atlanta
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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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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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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 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 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 Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.
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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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Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.
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A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
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Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
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Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.
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We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
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