Daniel J. Boorstin Quotations

Daniel J. Boorstin was an American historian, professor, attorney and author. He served as Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987.

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We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.
- The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [Vintage, 1992, ISBN 0-679-74180-1], Preface

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
- "A Case of Hypochondria," Newsweek (1970-07-06)

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
- Wall Street Journal (1985-12-31)
- On why he did his writing at home from 6:30 to 8:30 AM

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.
- The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992) (Vintage, 1993, ISBN 0-679-74375-8), Preface, p. XV

University of Chicago Press, 1993, ISBN 0-226-06497-2

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.
- Introduction, part 2: The Influence of America on the Mind (pp. 6-7)

While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator's power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.
- Ch. 1, part 2: The Economy of Nature (p. 41)

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.
- Ch. 3, The Physiology of Thought and Morals, introduction (p. 111)

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.
- Ch. 3, Part 2: The Happy Variety of Minds (p. 125)

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.
- Ch. 4, Part 1: Natural History and Political Science (p. 178)

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.
- Ch. 4, part 6: The American Destiny (p. 229)

Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully.
- Notes (p. 262)

Bob de Graff, who started Pocket Books, had a patent on a non-re-readable book, bound like a sealed memo pad, from which you would tear each page after you'd read it.

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

The cities of Italy are now deluged with droves of these creatures [tour groups], for they never separate, and you see them, forty in number, pouring along a street with their director — now in front, now at the rear, circling them like a sheep dog — and really the process is as like herding as may be.
- Charles James Lever, Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men and Women and Other Things in General (Blackwood's Magazine, 1864-1865): "Continental Excursionists" [Adamant Media Corporation, 2001, ISBN 0-543-90729-5], p. 243. Quoted by Boorstin in The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961) [Vintage, 1992, ISBN 0-679-74180-1], Ch. 3: From Traveler to Tourist: The Lost Art of Travel (p. 88)

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