Virginia Postrel Quotes

80 quotes in 1544 categories

• Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place.
• Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn’t give us a completely clear picture.
• Aesthetics has become too important to be left to the aesthetes. To succeed, hard-nosed engineers, real estate developers, and MBAs must take aesthetic communication, and…
• The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.
• Glamour doesn’t just happen, people don’t wake up in the morning glamorous.
• European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches. The experience…
• At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.
• Dialysis does not make patients well. It simply postpones their deaths.
• Kidney disease is a low-profile, unglamorous problem, a disease that disproportionately strikes minorities and the poor. Its celebrity spokesman is blue-collar comedian George Lopez, who…
• The intimate contest for self-command never ends, and lifetime happiness requires finding the right balance between present impulses and future well-being.
• We know we need bosses and deadlines to help us get work done. But sometimes we can also use an external push to make us…
• As a general rule, durable-goods production tends to be the most volatile sector of the economy. Since people usually have a stock of durables in…
• As discomfiting as it is to both market optimists and policy activists, a certain amount of instability is inherent to the economy.
• The growth of medical expenditures in the U.S. is not caused by administrative costs but by increases in the technical intensity of care over time…
• The evergreen story of people in debt becomes even sexier in an economic downturn, when debts inevitably get harder to pay.
• As borrowers, we may feel guilty about running up debt, anxious about making payments, and resentful of the constraints that old obligations (and old credit…
• When credit is cheaper to use and easier to arrange, people do use more of it.
• In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive…
• Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public.…
• Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics - not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but…

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