Top 70 Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Education is learning what you didn’t even know you didn’t know.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Featured in: Education Quotes, Study Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Teacher Quotes, Back-to-School Quotes

2. “The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Featured in: Education Quotes, Wisdom Quotes, Knowledge Quotes

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

4. “As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

5. “By reading we discover our world, our history, and ourselves.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Featured in: Reading Quotes

6. “Planning for the future without a sense of history is like planting cut flowers.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

7. “Throught human history, illusions of knowledge, not ignorance, have proven to be the principal obstacles to discovery.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

8. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire PR officers.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

9. “The fog of information can drive out knowledge.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

10. “While knowledge is orderly and cumulative, information is random and miscellaneous.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

12. “I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

13. “Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

14. “The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

15. “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.’”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

16. “The most promising words ever written on the maps of human knowledge are terra incognita, unknown territory.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

17. “Disagreement produces debate but dissent produces dissension.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

18. “The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

19. “If our knowledge is, as I believe, only an island in an infinite sea of ignorance, how can we in our short lifetime find satisfaction in exploring our little island? How can we persuade ourselves to be exhilarated by our meager knowledge and yet not be discouraged by the ocean vistas?”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

20. “Our discontent begins by finding false villains whom we can accuse of deceiving us. Next we find false heroes whom we expect to liberate us. The hardest, most discomfiting discovery is that each of us must emancipate himself.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

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

— Daniel J. Boorstin

22. “It is very unlikely that the computer will displace the books, except in areas where we need information speedily.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

23. “Books are messengers of freedom. They can be hidden under a mattress or smuggled into slave nations.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

24. “There was a time when the reader of an unexciting newspaper would remark, ‘How dull is the world today!’ Nowadays he says, ‘What a dull newspaper!’”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

Featured in: Reading Quotes

25. “The Christian test was a willingness to believe in the one Jesus Christ and His Message of salvation. What was demanded was not criticism but credulity. The Church Fathers observed that in the realm of thought only heresy had a history.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

26. “The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his image or trademark. The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media. The hero was a big man; the celebrity is a big name.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

27. “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.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

28. “Dispersed as the Jews are, they still form one nation, foreign to the land they live in.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

29. “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.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

30. “Each living art object, taken out of its native habitat so we can conveniently gaze at it, is like an animal in a zoo. Something about it has died in the removal.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

31. “The traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lens and the Cinema screen tend to narrow it.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

32. “More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

33. “There is no disinfectant like success.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

34. “God is the celebrity author of the world’s best seller. We have made god into the biggest celebrity of all, to contain our own emptiness.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

35. “The hero was distinguished by his achievement; the celebrity by his name or trademark.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

36. “Climaxing a movement for calendar reform which had been developing for at least a century, in 1582 Pope Gregory ordained that October 4 was to be followed by October 15.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

37. “What preoccupies us, then, is not God as a fact of nature, but as a fabrication useful for a God-fearing society. God himself becomes not a power but an image.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

38. “In America, communities existed before governments. There were many groups of people with a common sense of purpose and a feeling of duty to one another before there were political institutions.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

39. “When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

40. “The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

41. “Any government which made the welfare of men depend on the character of their governors was an illusion.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

42. “We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the ignorant.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

43. “History had been man’s effort to accomodate himself to what he could not do. Amereican history in the 20th century would, more than ever before, test man’s ability to accomodate himself to all the new things he could do.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

44. “No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

45. “The computer can help us find what we know is there. But the book remains our symbol and our resource for the unimagined question and the unwelcome answer.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

46. “Water, that wonderful, flowing medium, the luck of the planet – which would serve humankind in so many ways, and which would give our planet a special character.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

47. “The institutional scene in which American man has developed has lacked that accumulation from intervening stages which has been so dominant a feature of the European landscape.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

48. “While the Jeffersonian did not flatly deny the Creator’s power to perform miracles, he admired His refusal to do so.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

49. “Until now when we have started to talk about the uniqueness of America we have almost always ended by comparing ourselves to Europe. Toward her we have felt all the attraction and repulsions of Oedipus.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin

50. “The image is made to order, tailored to us. An ideal, on the hand, has a claim on us. It does not serve us, we serve it. If we have trouble striding toward it, we assume the matter is with us, and not the ideal.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin