Quotes by Virginia Postrel

About Virginia Postrel:

Virginia Inman Postrel is an American political and cultural writer of broadly libertarian, or classical liberal, views.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.

Virginia Postrel

For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters' essential forms?

Virginia Postrel

'CSI' has not only remained a top-rated show through seven seasons; it has had real-world consequences. Police and prosecutors complain of a 'CSI' effect' that leads juries to demand more physical evidence than they used to expect. College officials ...

Virginia Postrel

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

Virginia Postrel

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

Virginia Postrel

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.

Virginia Postrel

Like Disneyland, luxury retailers have long had to figure out how to overcome customers' natural inertia. Unlike less pricey stores, they tend not to attract idle browsers who make impulse purchases.

Virginia Postrel

In mid-July 2007, after a routine mammogram, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. As cancer diagnoses go, mine wasn't particularly scary. The affected area was small, and the surgeon seemed to think that a lumpectomy followed by radiation would eradic...

Virginia Postrel

More than two decades after the birth of Louise Brown, and all the hysteria that surrounded her 'test tube' conception, we should know that institutions, not technologies, create dystopias. Artificially conceived children are everywhere, beloved by t...

Virginia Postrel

Just as producers often give consumers things they want but didn't think to ask for, consumers sometimes come up with surprising uses for new inventions. When a new product appears, it can uncover dissatisfactions and desires no one knew were there.

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 Internet's abundance - of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority - creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what they want. But this plenitude threatens political and cultural authorities who believe in telli...

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

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

Virginia Postrel

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

Virginia Postrel

Viewers don't care how big media companies are. They care whether they can dump those they don't like, whether because of lousy service or because of crummy shows.

Virginia Postrel

Y2K hype taps our native discomfort with the realities of a dynamic, evolving social order. It elevates personal, local contact over the impersonality of the 'extended order' of trade and technological networks. It suggests that we can wipe the slate...

Virginia Postrel

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

Virginia Postrel

The evergreen story of people in debt becomes even sexier in an economic downturn, when debts inevitably get harder to pay.

Virginia Postrel

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

Virginia Postrel

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

Virginia Postrel

Author Bio

  • NameVirginia Postrel
  • DescriptionAmerican writer, editor, and libertarian
  • BornJanuary 14, 1960