Daniel Joseph Boorstin

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

Formerly a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary to keep him properly in the public eye.

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.

The American experience stirred mankind from discovery to exploration. From the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was out there, into an enthusiastic reaching to the unknown. These are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise.

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

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

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

The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
- All from Daniel Joseph Boorstin, 1914 - 2004

About:

Daniel Joseph Boorstin was born at Atlanta, Georgia on 1 Oct 1914. His father successfully defended a Jew falsely charged with rape and murder, the Ku Klux Klan's lynching of the defendant sent the family to Oklahoma. He graduated with honors from Harvard, won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford where he completed a double first and qualified as a barrister. Back in the US he earned his doctorate at Yale and was admitted to the Massachusetts bar. Naturally, his next step was to become a professor of history at the University of Chicago for 25 years. He was director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History for six years and Librarian of Congress for twelve. Historians panned his work, and the American Library Association opposed his appointment at the Library of Congress, in both cases because he was trained in law instead of the fields he actually worked in. Despite his education, he was brilliant in both roles, as well as in his observations about American culture.