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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.

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
Fraction
Failing
Billions
Fractions
Spend
Total
Open
Evening
Historians
Keep
Library
Libraries
People
Tiny
Refused
Notes
Historian
Defense
Note
Fail
Billion

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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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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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More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
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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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The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media.
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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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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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The hero was distinguished by his achievement the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man the celebrity is a big name.
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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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Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
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There is no disinfectant like success.
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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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I write to discover what I think.
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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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Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery
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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 messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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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.
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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.
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Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
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