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Quote by Daniel J. Boorstin

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Daniel J. Boorstin
Daniel J. Boorstin

Daniel J. Boorstin was an influential American historian known for his research on historical writing and public knowledge. His work emphasized the connection between history and contemporary life, as well as the role of historians in shaping public consciousness. more

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“The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice. If you take your children for a picnic on a doubtful day, they will demand a dogmatic answer as to whether it will be fine or wet, and be disappointed in you when you cannot be sure.”

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Book:Last Philosophical Testament: 1943-68
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“Men always fool themselves when they give up experience for systems born of the imagination. Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he can not break free, he can not leave even in thought; it is in vain that his spirit wants to soar beyond the bounds of the visible world, he is always forced to return.”

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Author:Baron d'Holbach
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“If you assume continuity, you can open the well-stocked mathematical toolkit of continuous functions and differential equations, the saws and hammers of engineering and physics for the past two centuries (and the foreseeable future).”

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Book:The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward
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“Qu. 31. Have not the small Particles of Bodies certain Powers, Virtues or Forces, by which they act at a distance, not only upon the Rays of Light for reflecting, refracting and reflecting them, but also upon one another for producing a great part of the Phænomena of Nature?”

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Book:MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY OPTICS
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“All material Things seem to have been composed of the hard and solid Particles ... variously associated with the first Creation by the Counsel of an intelligent Agent. For it became him who created them to set them in order: and if he did so, it is unphilosophical to seek for any other Origin of the World, or to pretend that it might arise out of a Chaos by the mere Laws of Nature.”

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Book:Isaac Newton: Philosophical Writings
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“Da Vinci was as great a mechanic and inventor as were Newton and his friends. Yet a glance at his notebooks shows us that what fascinated him about nature was its variety, its infinite adaptability, the fitness and the individuality of all its parts. By contrast what made astronomy a pleasure to Newton was its unity, its singleness, its model of a nature in which the diversified parts were mere disguises for the same blank atoms.”

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Book:The Common Sense of Science
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“Only a people serving an apprenticeship to nature can be trusted with machines. Only such people will so contrive and control those machines that their products are an enhancement of biological needs, and not a denial of them.”

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Book:The Grass Roots of Art: Lectures on the Social Aspects of Art in an Industrial Age
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