Quotes from Virginia Postrel

The children who are 'our future' will inherit a world created not just by parental devotion but by the sort of zealous, focused endeavors that can preclude good parenting.

Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami.

By giving unusual people an easy way to find one another, the Internet has also enabled them to pool rare talents, resources, and voices, then push their case into public consciousness. The response, in many cases, is a kind of hysteria.

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 use, when times get tight, they put off new purchases. What seem like small cutbacks to the end buyer translate into big swings for the producer.

In post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, skeptical voters demand full disclosure of everything from candidates' finances to their medical records, and spin-savvy accounts of backstage machinations dominate political coverage.

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

'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.

Apple doesn't need to maximize book sales. It simply needs to keep publishers happy enough to maintain an impressive-sounding inventory of titles while waiting for entirely new forms of publishing to develop.

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 to fulfill, the more coercive the force.

'The Matrix' is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on 'The Matrix' and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look - sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world.

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

Cinema isn't just a good medium for translating graphic novels. It's specifically a good medium for superheroes. On a fundamental, emotional level, superheroes, whether in print or on film, serve the same function for their audience as Golden Age movie stars did for theirs: they create glamour.

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 safety and labeling but exempted prescription medicines from the labeling rules.

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

Through the 1990s, 'Reason' was a voice of 'dissident feminism,' upholding the equal dignity of both sexes and supporting the rights of individuals against a government that had gone mad over sexual harassment.

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

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

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

With its fluctuating forms and needless decoration, fashion epitomizes the supposedly unproductive waste that inspired 20th-century technocrats to dream of central planning. It exists for no good reason. But that's practically a definition of art.

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 about who gets the goods and how. Socialism objects to markets because markets allocate resources in ways socialists believe to be unfair on both counts: both the who and the how.

Glamour is an imaginative process that creates a specific emotional response: a sharp mixture of projection, longing, admiration, and aspiration. It evokes an audience's hopes and dreams and makes them seem attainable, all the while maintaining enough distance to sustain the fantasy.

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

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. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor.

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 allocating economic resources. It may try to achieve that goal by nationalizing assets, by command-and-control regulation, or by taxation and redistribution.