Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.

Of all nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.

We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.

"The invading king, Utopus, had found the island easy to conquer "because the different sects were too busy fighting one another to oppose him,....he decreed that every man might cultivate the religion of his choice, and might proselytize for it, provided he did so quietly, modestly, and rationally and without bitterness toward others. If persuasions failed, no man was allowed to resort to abuse or violence under penalty of exile or enslavement." The king Utopus, "because he suspected that God perhaps likes various forms of worship and has therefore deliberately inspired different people with different views," allowed the widest toleration. "The only exception he made was a positive and strict law against any person who should sink so far below the dignity of human nature as to think that the soul perishes with the body, or that the universe is ruled by chance, rather than divine providence.

Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.

Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me.

MY hero is Man the Discoverer. The world we now view from the literate West — the vistas of time, the land and the seas, the heavenly bodies and our own bodies, the plants and animals, history and human societies past and present — had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses. In the deep recesses of the past, they remain anonymous. As we come closer to the present they emerge into the light of history, a cast of characters as varied as human nature. Discoveries become episodes of biography, unpredictable as the new worlds the discoverers opened to us. The obstacles to discovery — the illusions of knowledge — are also part of our story. Only against the forgotten backdrop of the received common sense and myths of their

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

While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent. Before the primacy of the image, a salesman or an advertisement would have to describe the attributes of a product in a rational appeal to the intellect. Afterward, it was the mythology of the brand, usually concocted by psychologists, that would sway a consumer’s heart. Likewise, with the rise of the image in politics, the policy platform of a presidential candidate would come to matter less than the ability of his image to convey ineffable or irrelevant values.

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.

The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude.

The American settlers came to take and shape the land. The first occupants of the land — the "Indians" whom the European migrants encountered — would not be treated, in the pattern of the Romans, as people to be incorporated into an empire. Instead, they were treated as part of the landscape. Most of them were simply cleared away, like the forest, or pushed back, like the wilderness.

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

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

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

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.