Explore Quotes by 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 one.

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.

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 world of crime is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted, spontaneous event.

The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.

The celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.

Human models are more vivid and more persuasive than explicit moral commands.

Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.

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

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

Time makes heroes but dissolves celebrities.

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.

A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.

Technology is so much fun but we can drown in our technology. The fog of information can drive out knowledge.

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.

I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.

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

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

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

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation._x000D__x000D_[Referring to the diverse holdings of the library, including motion pictures, photographs, recordings, posters and other historic objects which collectively far outnumber the books]