Daniel J. Boorstin Quotes

Many flagship state universities have wonderful digital libraries that are accessed by people around the world. In future, if not current, budget crises, trustees, board members, and administrators may wonder why these state institutions - with an articulated primary clientele of students, faculty, and staff members and a secondary clientele of all citizens of the state - should be spending resources on a digital library that is used by many people beyond the primary and secondary service populations.

Spending an extra dollar on the D.C. public school system isn't spending an extra dollar on education. Spending an extra dollar with the Pentagon doesn't buy you an extra dollar on defense. Republicans need to look skeptically at military spending.

The Pentagon budget, like all government spending, is an expression of priorities.

Failure to properly control our borders costs citizens in many ways: schools become overcrowded, medical resources are stretched too thin, other government services are overtaxed, and taxes increase further.

Demands for equal financing of sewers, streets, and garbage collection would make more sense than proposals for equal financing of the schools, since some plausible connection may be inferred between the amount of money expended, e.g., for roads, and the quality of service resulting to the taxpayer.

There is no escape from the cost of public needs.

A budget is a moral document of a nation’s priorities.

In our town meetings, and in our school district meetings, wealthy and substantial men oppose the grant of $15 to a school library, and of $30 for both library and apparatus; while at West Point they spend $50 in a single lesson at target firing, and the government keeps a hundred horses, and grooms and blacksmiths to take care of them, as an indispensable part of the apparatus of the academy. The pupils of our Normal schools, who are preparing to become teachers, must maintain themselves; the cadets at the academy receive $28 a month, during their entire term, as a compensation for being educated at the public expense.

Provision of facilities to the masses is linked with the collection of taxes.

I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions for war and war engines-more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system costs the nation.

If it is right that schools should be maintained by the whole community for the well-being of the whole, it is right also that libraries should be so maintained.

wouldn't you like to make sure all those millions you give to Uncle Sam went to schools and hospitals instead of nuclear warheads?' As a matter of fact, he would. Playgrounds for big kids, preschool programs to little ones, and mandatory LASIK surgery for NFL refs.

We can become very short-sighted in terms of objectives. The first thing to go during times of economic crisis and budget cuts is funding for things that are essential and not-quantifiable, like the arts. Save Big Bird

I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there." There might as well be, "Arsibalt said, "but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.

The issue is not about raising taxes. The issue is, how do we allocate the wealth that we have? We spend trillions of dollars on a military industrial complex. The United States accounts for 38% of all the military armaments produced in the world. 38%. This is a huge amount of money. People want and need services. They want roads, they want healthcare.

Without denying the value of scientific endeavor, there is a striking absurdity in committing billions to reach the moon where no people live, while only a fraction of that amount is appropriated to service the densely populated slums.

Doing good with other people's money has two basic flaws. In the first place, you never spend anybody else's money as carefully as you spend your own. So a large fraction of that money is inevitably wasted. In the second place, and equally important, you cannot do good with other people's money unless you first get the money away from them. So that force - sending a policeman to take the money from somebody's pocket - is fundamentally at the basis of the philosophy of the welfare state.

I thought we were out of money!? You can't simultaneously fire teachers AND tomahawk missiles.

Militarism consumes the strongest and most productive elements of each nation. Militarism swallows the largest part of the national revenue.

Generosity is a virtue for individuals, not governments. When governments are generous it is with other people’s money, other people’s safety, other people’s future.

I think that we need to measure how we give dollars to libraries by need. And the communities that are poor, in my opinion, should get more because you have to do more outreach.

We can talk about Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. We can talk about school, we can talk about everything. Defense is number one or we don't have a country.

We can't afford to lose control of our own borders or to take on new financial burdens at a time when we are not adequately providing for the jobs, the health care and the education of our own people.

For me, closing libraries is the equivalent of eating your seed corn to save a little money.

As a rich country, we can, in some sense, "afford" the war. But spending money on the war means that we are not spending money on other things that we could have spent the money on.