Daniel J. Boorstin quotes - page 3
The American settlers came to take and shape the land. The first occupants of the land - the "Indians" whom the European migrants encountered - would not be treated, in the pattern of the Romans, as people to be incorporated into an empire. Instead, they were treated as part of the landscape. Most of them were simply cleared away, like the forest, or pushed back, like the wilderness.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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
Pseudo‑events spawn other pseudo‑events in geometric progression. This is partly because every kind of pseudo-event (being planned) tends to become ritualized, with a protocol and a rigidity all its own. As each type of pseudo-event acquires this rigidity, pressures arise to produce other, derivative, forms of pseudo‑event which are more fluid, more tantalizing, and more interestingly ambiguous.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives -- from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango -- with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists stage.
Daniel J. Boorstin
It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer. The story of discoverers could be told in simple chronological order, since the latest science replaces what went before. But the arts are another story- a story of infinite addition. We must find order in the random flexings of the imagination.
Daniel J. Boorstin
Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel movement through space provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions perhaps one of the secret terrors of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.
Daniel J. Boorstin
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.
Daniel J. Boorstin
