Daniel J. Boorstin: Quotes about the world

Daniel J. Boorstin was American historian. Explore interesting quotes on world.
Daniel J. Boorstin: 78 quotes4 likes

“The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 37.

“Pseudo‑events do, of course, increase our illusion of grasp on the world, what some have called the American illusion of omnipotence. Perhaps, we come to think, the world’s problems can really be settled by “statements,” by “Summit” meetings, by a competition of “prestige,” by overshadowing images, and by political quiz shows.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 44.

“The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution—of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air—so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again, a new democratic world was being invented and was being discovered by Americans wherever they lived.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973), as cited in: Robert J. Gordon (2016), The Rise and Fall of American Growth, p. 1.

“Of all nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image. It was the land of the unexpected, of unbounded hope, of ideals, of quest for an unknown perfection. It is all the more unfitting that we should offer ourselves in images. And all the more fitting that the images which we make wittingly or unwittingly to sell America to the world should come back to haunt and curse us.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 245.

“The news leak is a pseudo‑event par excellence. In its origin and growth, the leak illustrates another axiom of the world of pseudo‑events: pseudo‑events produce more pseudo‑events.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 31.

“IN THE last half century a larger and larger proportion of our experience, of what we read and see and hear, has come to consist of pseudo‑events. We expect more of them and we are given more of them. They flood our consciousness. Their multiplication has gone on in the United States at a faster rate than elsewhere. Even the rate of increase is increasing every day. This is true of the world of education, of consumption, and of personal relations.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 12.

“By a diabolical irony the very facsimiles of the world which we make on purpose to bring it within our grasp, to make it less elusive, have transported us into a new world of blurs.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 213.

“The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.”

Daniel J. Boorstin

Source: The Republic of Technology (1978), p. 9.