Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

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

Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism - from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us. Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism - the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples. Instead, our peculiar idolatry is one with which the world till now has been unfamiliar... To flood the world with images of ourselves. It is to these images and not the material objects that we are devoted. No wonder that the puzzled world finds this unattractive and calls it by the name of its own old-fashioned vices.

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

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

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

"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."

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.

We must first awake before we can walk in the right direction. We must discover our illusions before we can even realize that we have been sleepwalking. The least and the most we can hope for is that each of us may penetrate the unknown jungle of images in which we live our daily lives. That we may discover anew where dreams end and where illusions begin. This is enough. Then we may know where we are, and each of us may decide for himself where he wants to go.

I write to discover what I think.

Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, were men of speculative temperament. What is the world made of? What are the elements and the processes by which the world is transformed? Greek philosophy and science were born together, of the passion to know. The Buddha’s aim was not to know the world or to improve it but to escape its suffering. His whole concern was salvation. It is not easy for us in the West to understand or even name this Buddhist concern. To say that the Buddhists had a “philosophy” would be misleading.

"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.

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.

When photography appeared in the nineteenth century, it offered a new challenge to the mullahs’ theological acrobatics. Muslims wishing to be photographed remembered the Hadiths against pictorial representation. They were glad to be told that since photographs were made by God Himself through the agency of His Sun they were not under the ban of the paintings by presumptuous human artists. Yet in much of the Muslim world, photographs remained under the Prophet’s ban. A Muslim photographer in Delphi, who had spent many years successfully photographing people in groups, in an onrush of conscience finally destroyed all his plates.

The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air—so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again, a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.

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.