Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

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.

The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. 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.

We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.

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.

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.

In the West, castrati are known to history not for their political influence but mainly for their vocal peculiarities. In addition to removing the power to procreate, the castrating operation retards the deepening of the voice, and leaves the eunuch a soprano. From Constantinople the practice spread of using eunuchs in choirs. In the eighteenth century Handel’s operas featured castrati, who then began to dominate the opera scene, sometimes requiring composers to write in parts especially for them. Until the early nineteenth century castrati sang in the papal choir in Rome. The Italian practice of castrating boys to prepare them to become adult male sopranos did not end till the reign of Pope Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century.

The best survey of the spirit and practice of the laws of Massachusetts Bay is found in Zechariah Chafee Jr.’s brilliant introduction to the Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671–1680, in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications, Vol. XXIX.

"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."

"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.

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.

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy...to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

"The elementary notion, what gave Toynbee's work its popular appeal, was readily capsuled in the ideas of "challenge" and "response.