Quotes from Daniel J. Boorstin

I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.

Standing, standing, standing - why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.

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

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

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.

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.'

The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived; less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced.

Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well simply because it was selling well.

A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off each other.

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

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

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

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

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

Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.

Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

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.

There is no cure for illusions. There is only the opportunity for discovery.