Quotes from Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Yet, while tobacco and the newly dominant Southern crop, cotton, put Southern roots ever deeper into the soil, the fisheries drew New England out toward the world.

The more readily we make household names and the more numerous they become, the less are they worthy of our admiration... We can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero. In a now-almost-forgotten sense, all heroes are self-made.

Now, these parts of the earth [Europe, Africa, Asia] have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be described in what follows). Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why any one should justly object to calling this part Amerige [from Greek "ge" meaning "land of"], i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.

When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington's birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.

Mortal as I am," wrote Ptolemy, "I know that I am born for a day, but when I follow the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth; I ascend to Zeus himself to feast me on ambrosia, the food of the gods." He

Seekers found clues in the successes, failures, and confusions of predecessors, who became their inspiration, their targets, their resource. From Socrates, Plato learned both caution and the need for bold patterns of meaning of his own. From Plato, Aristotle learned the perils of deserting the world of the senses. Still the later somehow did not make the earlier irrelevant. Seekers, like artists, never wholly displaced those who had tried before. They all enlarged and enriched the menu.

In 1792 their decimal calendar replaced the 7-day week by a 10-day week called a décade, each day of which was given a Latin numerical name, three of which comprised a month. The day was divided into ten hours, each consisting of 100 minutes, each minute of 100 seconds.

For the Hindu the creation was not a bringing into being of the wonder of the world. Rather it was a dismemberment, a disintegration of the original Oneness. For him the Creation seemed not the expression of a rational, benevolent Maker in wondrous new forms but a fragmenting of the unity of nature into countless limited forms. The Hindu saw the creation of our world as "the self-limitation of the transcendent.

The theory called Euhemerism argued that all gods may have originally been only human rulers elevated to divinity by later generations for their benefits to mankind.

But illusions die hard, and the brighter they are the longer they take adying.

The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means "inquiry" or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past.

The counsel on public relations," Mr. Bernays explains, "not only knows what news value is, but knowing it, he is in a position to make news happen. He is a creator of events.

The best survey of the spirit and practice of the laws of Massachusetts Bay is found in Zechariah Chafee Jr.'s brilliant introduction to the Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671–1680, in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications, Vol. XXIX.

When in our schools the study of current events (that is, of what is reported in the newspapers) displaces the facts of history, it is inevitable that the standard of knowledge propagated by newspapers and magazines and television networks themselves (that is, whether one is up on what is reported in the newspapers, magazines, and television) overshadows all others. When to be informed is to knowledgeable about pseudo-events, the line between knowledge and ignorance is blurred as never before.

Our great artists battle on a landscape we cannot chart, with weapons we do not comprehend, against adversaries we find unreal.

But for Aristotle the meaning was hidden in the particulars of experience. The scope of his work was itself witness to his belief in the unity of experience and his confidence that it could somehow be encompassed by the human mind. And so he confirms his axiom that the actuality of thought is life.

Inspiring all Holmes's championship of free expression was his seeking spirit, his doubt that he or anyone had an avenue to the absolute. The great act of faith, he wrote to his friend William James (who hardly needed the advice), is when man decides that he is not God. On his ninetieth birthday he was still reminding young men that his discovery I was not God was his secret of success.

Progress, for Comte, unlike Condorcet, is not indefinite, but continuous. And there is no room for surprise or the whims of personal liberty. It was no wonder, then, that the doctrines of Enlightenment and social science, touted to liberate man from the tyranny of the priesthood, would soon establish their own tyranny. Comte and his successors could not imagine that their gospel of progress might prove as ephemeral as the fictions of theologians or the abstractions of metaphysicians.

Unlike the Western world of a surprising Creation, of man at war with nature, the world of Confucius transformed by Taoist and Buddhist currents saw man at home among transformations, procreations, and re-creations.

The followers of Arius (born c. 250) believed that Christ, being the most perfect creature in the material world, had been adopted by God as a son. And the view had been spread by Arius' popular poetic work, Thalia (Banquet), which led to Arius' condemnation by the bishops as a heretic, and his exile from his post as priest in Alexandria. Constantine betrayed his own theological innocence when he called this dispute a fight over trifling and foolish verbal differences.

Herodotus also repeatedly reports the prophetic power of dreams, though he leaves the reader to judge.

The elementary notion, what gave Toynbee's work its popular appeal, was readily capsuled in the ideas of challenge and response.

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