Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

American historian (1914–2004)

Daniel J. Boorstin (1 October 1914 – 28 February 2004) was an American historian, professor, attorney, and author. He served as the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in 1969-1973 and was the Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987. His book trilogy, The Americans: The Colonial Experience, The National Experience, and The Democratic Experience received the Bancroft Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Francis Parkman Prize. In 1989, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was bestowed upon him.

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Native Name: Daniel Joseph Boorstin

Alternative Names: Daniel Boorstin

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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.

Jefferson refused to pin his hopes on the occasional success of honest and unambitious men; on the contrary, the great danger was that philosophers would be lulled into complacence by the accidental rise of a Franklin or a Washington. Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.

The variety of minds served the economy of nature in many ways. The Creator, who designed the human brain for activity, had insured the restlessness of all minds by enabling no single one to envisage all the qualities of the creation. Since no one by himself could aspire to a serene knowledge of the whole truth, all men had been drawn into an active, exploratory and cooperative attitude.

While the easiest way in metaphysics is to condemn all metaphysics as nonsense, the easiest way in morals is to elevate the common practice of the community into a moral absolute.

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

The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.

The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story — a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.

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

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

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

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.

Our attitude toward our own culture has recently been characterized by two qualities, braggadocio and petulance. Braggadocio —- empty boasting of American power, American virtue, American know-how —- has dominated our foreign relations now for some decades. ... Here at home —- within the family, so to speak —- our attitude to our culture expresses a superficially different spirit, the spirit of petulance. Never before, perhaps, has a culture been so fragmented into groups, each full of its own virtue, each annoyed and irritated at the others.

The counsel on public relations,” Mr. Bernays explains, “not only knows what news value is, but knowing it, he is in a position to make news happen. He is a creator of events.