Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes - Page 3

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

Being known primarily for their well-knownness, celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.

A pseudo-event ... comes about because someone has planned it, planted, or incited it. Typically, it is not a train wreck or an earthquake, but an interview.

The cities of Italy are now deluged with droves of these creatures [tour groups], for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director - now in front, now at the rear, circling them like a sheep dog - and really the process is as like herding as may be.

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

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.

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.

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.

Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.

The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us, we serve it. If we have trouble striding toward it, we assume the matter is with us, and not the ideal.

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.

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!'

The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

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

Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives- from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango - with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage.

Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

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

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

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.

While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.

There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.

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

The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his name or trademark.