There's something beautifully soothing about a fact — even (or perhaps especially) if we're not sure what it means.

Boorstin is pointing to the psychological comfort people often take in “facts” as objects—solid, countable, seemingly objective—even when their significance is unclear. The line suggests that factuality can function like a sedative: it reassures us that we are anchored to reality, or at least to something that looks like reality, regardless of whether we have interpreted it well. Implicitly, the quote critiques a culture that prizes information and data for their own sake, mistaking accumulation for understanding. It also hints at the modern temptation to treat facts as substitutes for meaning, allowing certainty of “having facts” to stand in for the harder work of judgment and interpretation.