Quotes from Daniel J. Boorstin

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

The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.

What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.

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

God is the celebrity author of the world's best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.

Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

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.

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

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

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.

Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.

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

There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, 'How dull is the world today!' Nowadays he says, 'What a dull newspaper!'