Skip to content

The great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

— Daniel J. Boorstin The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself (1983)

Another quote →

Topics

Knowledge

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

These creators, makers of the new, can never become obsolete, for in the arts there is no correct answer.

The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (1992)

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

A celebrity is a person who is known for his well-knownness.

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)

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

The Republic of Technology (1978)

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

The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (1948)

All Daniel J. Boorstin quotes →

You may also like

You have to start with the truth. The truth is the only way that we can get anywhere. Because any decision-making that is based upon lies or ignorance can't lead to a good conclusion.

Julian Assange

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education.

Bertrand Russell

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Daniel J. Boorstin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.