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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
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Atlanta
Georgia
Moral
Metaphysics
Community
Condemn
Common
Easiest
Way
Morals
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Absolute
Practice
Elevate
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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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The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
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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.
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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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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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.
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The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
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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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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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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media.
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While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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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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