Quotes from Daniel J. Boorstin

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

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

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

The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature; the celebrity reveals the possibilities of the media.

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

The shadow has become the substance.

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 now fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

This sense of time, the awareness that countless others have come before and that others will follow in endless generations, distinguishes man from other animals. With this discovery of the meaning of death—that man's own life is limited—the life of architecture begins. And so begins man the creator's effort to conquer time.

More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.

The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita—unknown territory.

The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men's use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war.

Much of what we have been doing to improve the world's opinion of us has had the contrary effect. Audio-visual aids which we have sent over the world are primary aids to the belief in the irrelevance, the arrogance, the rigidity, and the conceit of America. Not because they are poorly made. On the contrary, because they are well made and vividly projected. Not because they are favorable images or unfavorable images, but because they are images.

We try to make our celebrities stand in for the heroes we no longer have, or for those who have been pushed out of our view... Yet the celebrity is usually nothing greater than a more-publicized version of us. In imitating him, in trying to dress like him, talk like him, look like him, think like him, we are simply imitating ourselves.

They vie with one another in offering attractive, "informative" accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived questions.

We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.

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.

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