Daniel J. Boorstin

"In the age of pseudo‑events it is less the artificial sim­plification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us. Whenever in the public mind a pseudo‑event competes for attention…"

"Since the Creator had made the facts of the after-life inaccessible to man, He must not have required that man understand death in order to live fruitfully."

"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 fallen in love with our own image, with images …"

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

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

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

"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 …"

"Pseudo‑events spawn other pseudo‑events in geometric progression. This is partly because every kind of pseudo­-event tends to become ritualized, with a protocol and a rigidity all its own. As each typ…"