Top 15 Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

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

No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.

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

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.

I write to discover what I think

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

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

I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress.

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

Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

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

[Reading is like] the sex act — done privately, and often in bed.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire good PR.

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.