All Virginia Postrel Quotes
- Average Americans order nonfat decaf iced vanilla lattes at Starbucks and choose from 1,500 drawer pulls at The Great Indoors. Amazon gives every town a… Amazon
- The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. Importing polish was banned only in July 2001, which… Amputating
- The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out. Adornment
- Science is about exploring the unknown and cannot offer guarantees. Cannot Offer
- The SAT is not perfect. We all know smart, knowledgeable people who do badly on standardized tests. But neither is it useless. SAT scores do… All
- Our demand for good looks, expressed in the biting comments that ensue when public figures fall short of perfection, puts enormous pressures on these individuals… Biting
- The theater itself is a lie. Its deaths are mere special effects. Its tales never happened. Even the histories are distorted for dramatic effect. The… Audience
- Society needs both parents and nonparents, both the work party and the home party. While raising children is the most important work most people will… Both
- Americans hate their cable companies - for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more… Able
- Many different relationships among patients, doctors, and drugs are possible and desirable. As in so many other areas of life, the Internet encourages experimentation. Questionnaire-based… Among
- Rising living standards - whether in a village, a region, a nation, or the world - depend first on specialization: on letting people concentrate on… Best
- The United States government approaches patient choice in medication as Singapore does free speech: its pronouncements sound reasonable and tolerant until you threaten its prerogatives. Approaches
- Internet pharmacies return to consumers the choice promised by supporters of the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. That law established federal requirements for drug… Act
- Surprise drives progress because innovation depends on the sort of knowledge no one can gather in a central place. Central
- The goal of socialism is a fairer allocation of economic resources, which its advocates often claim will also be a less wasteful one. Socialism is… Advocate
- Socialism is about claims of justice, and it is also about money: about wealth, income, physical and financial capital. It is an ideology based on… Achieve
- Bill Clinton has done some incredibly reckless, irresponsible things as president. But his campaign to expand Medicare entitlements has to rank among the worst. Among
- Medicare is a monopoly: a central-planning bureaucracy grafted onto American health care. It exercises a stranglehold on the health care of all Americans over 65,… All
- Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want. Attention
- Persuasion has become a kind of force. The more the advertiser knows about what consumers want, and the more desires the product and packaging seek… Advertiser
- A lot of consumers actively enjoy advertising, especially fashion print ads and clever TV commercials. The nostalgic cable channel TVLand features not only vintage shows… Actively
- Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines… Ads
- The innovative process is a fragile one, dependent on a complex, often messy interplay of imagination, competition, and exchange. Curbing new ideas hurts not only… Audience
- The Y2K bug is a genuine technical concern, consuming the energies of many specialists. But the prophecies of doom represent a broader worldview using the… Ambition
- Wars without military objectives have a tendency to go on forever. Forever