Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

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

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

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

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes "sight-seeing."

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

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

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

Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.

As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.

America has been a land of dreams. A land where the aspirations of people from countries cluttered with rich, cumbersome, aristocratic, ideological pasts can reach for what once seemed unattainable. Here they have tried to make dreams come true. Yet now... we are threatened by a new and particularly American menace. It is not the menace of class war, of ideology, of poverty, of disease, of illiteracy, or demagoguery, or of tyranny, though these now plague most of the world. It is the menace of unreality.