Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

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

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.

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

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before...We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy...to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer.

Best-sellerism is the star system of the book world. A (best-seller) is a celebrity among books. It is a book known primarily (sometimes exclusively) for its well-knownness.

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

A celebrity is a person known for his well-knownness. Celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by being well known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis celebrities live off each other.

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

The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced.

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