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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
Biographer
Historian
Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Practice
Elevate
Moral
Metaphysics
Community
Condemn
Common
Easiest
Way
Morals
Nonsense
Absolutes
Absolute

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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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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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I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
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Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
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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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Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
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The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
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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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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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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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