Virginia Postrel Quotes

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 aesthetic pleasure, seriously. We, their customers, demand it.

How we feel about the evolving future tells us who we are as individuals and as a civilization: Do we search for stasis-a regulated, engineered world? Or do we embrace dynamism-a world of constant creation, discovery, and competition?

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

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 changed the way people referred to the glamour of battle; they treated it no longer as a positive quality but as a dangerous illusion.

The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out.

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 measure both specific knowledge and valuable thinking skills.

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 received a kidney from his wife.

In a dynamic, decentralized system of individual choice and responsibility, people do not have to trust any authority but their own.

The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace.

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

Glamour is translucent - not transparent, not opaque.

It invites us into the world but it doesn't give us a completely clear picture.

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

At the simplest level, only people who know they do not know everything will be curious enough to find things out.

All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality. They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other - and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals.

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

Abundant choice doesn't force us to look for the absolute best of everything.

It allows us to find the extremes in those things we really care about, whether that means great coffee, jeans cut wide across the hips, or a spouse who shares your zeal for mountaineering, Zen meditation, and science fiction.

Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.