Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes - Page 4

Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.

The improved American highway system isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedway he had no contact with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas, he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had one of Howard Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.

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

Americans expect to eat and stay thin, to be constantly on the move and ever more neighborly ... to revere God and be God.

The most important lesson of American history is the promise of the unexpected. None of our ancestors would have imagined settling way over here on this unknown continent. So we must continue to have society that is hospitable to the unexpected, which allows possibilities to develop beyond our own imaginings.

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

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.

It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.

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.

Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

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

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

An enamored amateur need not be a genius to stay out of the ruts he has never been trained in.

While the focus in the landscape of Old World cities was commonly government structures, churches, or the residences of rulers, the landscape and the skyline of American cities have boasted their hotels, department stores, office buildings, apartments, and skyscrapers. In this grandeur, Americans have expressed their Booster Pride, their hopes for visitors and new settlers, and customers, for thriving commerce and industry.

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.

Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.

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

American civilization, from its beginnings, had combined a dogmatic confidence in the future with a naive puzzlement over what the future might bring.

When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.

In the twentieth century our highest praise is to call the Bible 'The World's Best Seller.' And it has come to be more and more difficult to say whether we think it is a best seller because it is great, or vice versa.

While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.

Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.

The most refined skills of color printing, the intricate techniques of wide-angle photography, provide us pictures of trivia bigger and more real than life. We forget that we see trivia and notice only that the reproduction is so good. Man fulfils his dream and by photographic magic produces a precise image of the Grand Canyon. The result is not that he adores nature or beauty the more. Instead he adores his camera - and himself.

Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet - which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which would give our planet a special character.

What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?