Daniel J. Boorstin

While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

“Much of what we have been doing to improve the world's opinion of us has had the contrary effect. Audio-visual aids which…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation. [Referring to the diverse holdings of the…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

“There is no cure for illusions. There is only the opportunity for discovery.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

“The more readily we make household names and the more numerous they become, the less are they worthy of our admiration... We…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary,…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

“They vie with one another in offering attractive, “informative” accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on the…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

If our knowledge is, as I believe, only an island in an infinite sea of ignorance, how can we in our short…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

We read advertisements ... to discover and enlarge our desires.

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death…

— Daniel J. Boorstin

The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company…

— Daniel J. Boorstin