The Image Quotes

“We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“The shadow has become the substance.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“Although we may suffer from idolatry, we do not, I think, suffer from materialism - from the overvaluing of material objects for their own sake. Of this the world accuses us. Yet our very wealth itself has somehow made us immune to materialism - the characteristic vice of impoverished peoples. Instead, our peculiar idolatry is one with which the world till now has been unfamiliar... To flood the world with images of ourselves. It is to these images and not the material objects that we are devoted. No wonder that the puzzled world finds this unattractive and calls it by the name of its own old-fashioned vices.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“As individuals and as a nation, we now suffer from social narcissism. The beloved Echo of our ancestors, the virgin America, has been abandoned. We have now fallen in love with our own image, with images of our making, which turn out to be images of ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“While words take time to utter and hear, and require attention to parse their meaning, the impact of the image is instantaneous, its influence decadent. Before the primacy of the image, a salesman or an advertisement would have to describe the attributes of a product in a rational appeal to the intellect. Afterward, it was the mythology of the brand, usually concocted by psychologists, that would sway a consumer’s heart. Likewise, with the rise of the image in politics, the policy platform of a presidential candidate would come to matter less than the ability of his image to convey ineffable or irrelevant values. Though”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“We try to make our celebrities stand in for the heroes we no longer have, or for those who have been pushed out of our view... Yet the celebrity is usually nothing greater than a more-publicized version of us. In imitating him, in trying to dress like him, talk like him, look like him, think like him, we are simply imitating ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“There is no cure for illusions. There is only the opportunity for discovery.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“We hardly dare face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“They vie with one another in offering attractive, “informative” accounts and images of the world. They are free to speculate on the facts, to bring new facts into being, to demand answers to their own contrived questions.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“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.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“The more readily we make household names and the more numerous they become, the less are they worthy of our admiration... We can make a celebrity, but we can never make a hero. In a now-almost-forgotten sense, all heroes are self-made.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“Our great artists battle on a landscape we cannot chart, with weapons we do not comprehend, against adversaries we find unreal.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“There is no cure for illusion. There is only the opportunity for discovery.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“When in our schools the study of "current events" (that is, of what is reported in the newspapers) displaces the facts of history, it is inevitable that the standard of knowledge propagated by newspapers and magazines and television networks themselves (that is, whether one is "up on" what is reported in the newspapers, magazines, and television) overshadows all others. When to be informed is to knowledgeable about pseudo-events, the line between knowledge and ignorance is blurred as never before.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

“The counsel on public relations,” Mr. Bernays explains, “not only knows what news value is, but knowing it, he is in a position to make news happen. He is a creator of events.”
― Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America