Virginia Postrel

Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place.

— Virginia Postrel

When credit is cheaper to use and easier to arrange, people do use more of it.

— Virginia Postrel

Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.

— Virginia Postrel

A standard 'well woman' checkup can last as little as 10 minutes, hardly time for any in-depth discussions.

— Virginia Postrel

Wars without military objectives have a tendency to go on forever.

— Virginia Postrel

Clothes are unique sculptures, dependent on a supporting human form and created to move.

— Virginia Postrel

The whole point of movie glamour was - and is - escape.

— Virginia Postrel

Progress through trial and error depends not only on making trials, but on recognizing errors.

— Virginia Postrel

Persuasion has become a kind of force. The more the advertiser knows about what consumers want, and the more desires the product…

— Virginia Postrel

The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless.…

— Virginia Postrel

A lot of consumers actively enjoy advertising, especially fashion print ads and clever TV commercials. The nostalgic cable channel TVLand features not…

— Virginia Postrel

As discomfiting as it is to both market optimists and policy activists, a certain amount of instability is inherent to the economy.

— Virginia Postrel

There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the…

— Virginia Postrel

Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel. It is a subjective…

— Virginia Postrel

Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew…

— Virginia Postrel

Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on specialization: on letting…

— Virginia Postrel

We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes…

— Virginia Postrel

The goal of socialism is a fairer allocation of economic resources, which its advocates often claim will also be a less wasteful…

— Virginia Postrel

Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant - that's why,…

— Virginia Postrel

The Internet's abundance - of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority - creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what…

— Virginia Postrel

Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level,…

— Virginia Postrel

“The future we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, like all futures left to themselves, “emergent, complex messiness.” Its…

— Virginia Postrel

The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas…

— Virginia Postrel

Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes…

— Virginia Postrel

The mobile middle class gravitates to the cities where housing is affordable.

— Virginia Postrel

Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees.

— Virginia Postrel

The common intuition is that e-books should be cheap because they aren't physical - no printing, no shipping.

— Virginia Postrel

On the Internet, people on the tails of the bell curve can find one another.

— Virginia Postrel

The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.

— Virginia Postrel

Storage problems make neon signs the most ephemeral of commercial arts.

— Virginia Postrel

Even before Sputnik, scientists and policy makers worried that not enough Americans were studying science.

— Virginia Postrel

Glamour doesn’t just happen, people don’t wake up in the morning glamorous.

— Virginia Postrel

Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.

— Virginia Postrel

On the Net, the bell curve reclaims its tails. The uncommon is as accessible as the common. The very fragmentation of the…

— Virginia Postrel

Kidney donors don't have to be close relatives of recipients, but they do need to have the right blood type. And kidneys…

— Virginia Postrel

Standardized sizes made inexpensive, off-the-rack garments economically feasible. They gave shoppers a reliable guide to finding clothes in self-service shops.

— Virginia Postrel

The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go…

— Virginia Postrel

The intimate contest for self-command never ends, and lifetime happiness requires finding the right balance between present impulses and future well-being.

— Virginia Postrel

Like the 'test tube babies' born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be identifiable, much less freaks or outcasts.

— Virginia Postrel

Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place.

— Virginia Postrel