Quotes by Daniel Boorstin

• I've learned any fool can write a bad ad, but it takes a real genius to keep his hands off a good one.
• A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
• A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
• A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
• An image is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service.
• 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.
• As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
• Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
• Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
• We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
• I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
• Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.
• Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
• 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."
• We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it.
• We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
• Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.
• The world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.
• Reading is like the sex act - done privately, and often in bed.
• The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.
• The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
• The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
• The courage to imagine the otherwise is our greatest resource, adding color and suspense to all our life.
• The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.
• Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
• Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
• Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.