Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

I write to discover what I think.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

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.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.

The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.

We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

An image is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service.

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.

We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.

As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.