160 Quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men’s use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war.

Much of what we have been doing to improve the world’s opinion of us has had the contrary effect. Audio-visual aids which we have sent over the world are primary aids to the belief in the irrelevance, the arrogance, the rigidity, and the conceit of America. Not because they are poorly made. On the contrary, because they are well made and vividly projected. Not because they are favorable images or unfavorable images, but because they are images.

The hero reveals the possibilities of human nature; the celebrity reveals the possibilities of the media.

Jeffersonian isolationism expressed an essentially cosmopolitan spirit. The Jeffersonian was determined – even at the expense of separating himself from the rest of the globe, and even though he be charged with provincial selfishness – to preserve America as an uncontaminated laboratory.

Yet, while tobacco and the newly dominant Southern crop, cotton, put Southern roots ever deeper into the soil, the fisheries drew New England out toward the world.

Standing, standing, standing – why do I have to stand all the time? That is the main characteristic of social Washington.

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

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.

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.