The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge.
"Daniel Joseph Boorstin" was an American historian at the University of Chicago, writing on many topics in American history and world history. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of Congress/Librarian Library of Congress/of the United States Congress in 1975 and served until 1987. He was instrumental in the creation of the Library of Congress Center for the Book.
Repudiating his youthful membership in the Communist Party while a Harvard undergraduate (1938–39), Boorstin became a political conservative and a prominent exponent of Consensus history.. He argued in The Genius of American Politics (1953) that ideology, propaganda, and political theory are foreign to America. His writings were often linked with such historians as Richard Hofstadter, Louis Hartz and Clinton Rossiter as a proponent of the "consensus school," which emphasized the unity of the American people and downplayed class and social conflict. Boorstin especially praised inventors and entrepreneurs as central to the American success story.
If you enjoy these quotes, be sure to check out other famous historians! More Daniel J. Boorstin on Wikipedia.A sign of celebrity is that his name is often worth more than his services.
We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
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 tortur.
I write to discover what I think. After all, the bars aren't open that early.
More appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowledge.
Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some hire public relations officers.
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."
Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
Copyright © 2024 Electric Goat Media. All Rights Reserved.