Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

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

"For Toynbee, finally, the "higher religions" displaced societies or civilizations as the units that gave meaning to history. While brashly insisting on his naively English empirical reliance on facts, which he amassed in prodigious quantity, still in his personal quest for salvation he had developed his own universal apocalyptic view. His reassurance of universal salvation had wide appeal in an age of two world wars. Scholars have objected less to Toynbee's vague definitions of society and civilization than to his tendency to simplify the study of history into a branch of theodicy-an answer to Job, a science of justifying God's ways to man."

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

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

"If, as Ricardo had argued, all economic value was derived from human labor, then the capitalist prospered by paying workers less than the value that they had added and pocketing the difference. To secure the maximum profit, the capitalist paid the worker only enough for his subsistence. Surplus value, then, is the value produced by the worker beyond what he is compensated. Thus the capitalist's profit came from the exploiting the worker. Although unequivocal in his dogmas of history and of economics, Marx's lively mind occasionally rebelled at hints of orthodoxy. And he more than once declared, "I am not a Marxist.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

Dominated as we are by graphic vistas in perspective, we hardly remember the philosophers’ arguments against this “perspective” way of seeing the world. Plato, who had his own way of looking at everything, objected to the very same “deception” of the senses that Vitruvius had praised as a way of giving a “faithful representation of the appearance of buildings in painted scenery.” If two objects or two persons were really the same size, Plato argued, the honest artist should make them so in his picture, and not depict one smaller than the other simply because it was seen at a greater distance.

Pseudo‑events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence. Perhaps, we come to think, the world’s problems can really be settled by “statements,” by “Summit” meetings, by a competition of “prestige,” by overshadowing images, and by political quiz shows.

"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.