Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

"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."

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.

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.

"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.

"Religions played an increasingly dominant role in Toynbee's view as he grew older and advanced with his "Study of History." "The principal cause of war in our world today." he wrote on Apirl 9, 1935, in the Manchester Guardian, "is the idolatrous worship which is paid by human beings to nations and communities of states. This tribe-worship is the oldest religion of mankind, and it has only been overcome in so far as human beings have been genuinely converted to Christianity or one of the other higher religions....The spirit of man abhors a spiritual vacuum....People will sacrifice themselves for the 'Third Reich' ir wgatever tge Ersatz-Gotzen may be, till they learn again to sacrifice themselves for the Kingdom of God." After 1937, Toynbee flirted with Catholicism and he came to believe that the meaning of history would be revealed only in the slow and painful clarification of the relation between God and man."

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance — it is the illusion of knowledge.

Mortal as I am,” wrote Ptolemy, “I know that I am born for a day, but when I follow the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the earth; I ascend to Zeus himself to feast me on ambrosia, the food of the gods.” He

For the Hindu the creation was not a bringing into being of the wonder of the world. Rather it was a dismemberment, a disintegration of the original Oneness. For him the Creation seemed not the expression of a rational, benevolent Maker in wondrous new forms but a fragmenting of the unity of nature into countless limited forms. The Hindu saw the creation of our world as “the self-limitation of the transcendent.

"When in our schools the study of "current events" (that is, of what is reported in the newspapers) displaces the facts of history, it is inevitable that the standard of knowledge propagated by newspapers and magazines and television networks themselves (that is, whether one is "up on" what is reported in the newspapers, magazines, and television) overshadows all others. When to be informed is to knowledgeable about pseudo-events, the line between knowledge and ignorance is blurred as never before."

Unlike the Western world of a surprising Creation, of man at war with nature, the world of Confucius transformed by Taoist and Buddhist currents saw man at home among transformations, procreations, and re-creations.

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.

When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington’s birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.

"Inspiring all Holmes's championship of free expression was his seeking spirit, his doubt that he or anyone had an avenue to the absolute. "The great act of faith," he wrote to his friend William James (who hardly needed the advice), "is when man decides that he is not God." On his ninetieth birthday he was still reminding young men that his "discovery I was not God" was his "secret of success.

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

"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.