Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

Greek was the language of most citizens of Constantinople, but the commission’s product was in Latin, Justinian’s native language. The Corpus Juris Civilis, as the whole codifying work came to be called, had no effective competition in the West for thirteen hundred years, and the Roman Empire survived in Justinian’s Byzantine legal incarnation.

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

"The state arises, Socrates explains, "out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants." Division of labor then provides the needed services, while allowing each person to do what he is best fitted for. So the community has farmers, weavers, builders, merchants, shoemakers, and all the rest. And as the state expands to meet multiplying wants, it must have a standing army. Yet, until the refinements of culture have been added, this is no better than a "city of pigs.

"I became aware," Toynbee recalled, "of a difference in national traditions. Where the German a priori method drew blank, let us see what could be done by English empiricism."

Focusing on the genesis and survival of societies, his original approach was eminently practical and fact-oriented. He started with an intriguing paradox. "The view that certain environments, presenting easy and comfortable conditions of life, provide the key to an explanation of the origin of civilizations is examined and rejected." Instead he "suggests the possibility that man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment, but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make hitherto unprecedented effort." Both sides of the paradox are supported by facts from around the earth:

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

Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined — even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness — to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.

They vie with one another in offering attractive, “informative” accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived questions.

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

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.

Now, these parts of the earth [Europe, Africa, Asia] have been more extensively explored and a fourth part has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci (as will be described in what follows). Inasmuch as both Europe and Asia received their names from women, I see no reason why any one should justly object to calling this part Amerige [from Greek “ge” meaning “land of”], i.e., the land of Amerigo, or America, after Amerigo, its discoverer, a man of great ability.

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

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 hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.

"Spengler's book is rich in these "morphological relationships" between dissimilar activities that prove the coherent spirit of each culture and epoch. So there was a common spirit int eh ancient Greek polis and in Euclidean geometry, as there was also between the differential calculus and the state of Louis XIV. Chronological "contemporaneity" was misleading. It should be replaced by an understanding of how different events play similar roles in expressing the culture spirit. Thus he sees his own kind of "contemporaneity" in the Trojan War and the Crusades, in Homer and the songs of the Nibelungs."

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.