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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Virginia Postrel Quotes

The history of the Internet is not, as some people have tried to make it, a libertarian just-so story. It is a messy tale in which the government played a significant role. That role was, however, far more subtle than the plans of industrial policy gurus or techno-boosting politicians.

– Virginia Postrel

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, and on the medical practices of almost all physicians. Medicare decides what is legitimate and what is not: which prices may be charged and which services may be rendered.

– 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

The biggest threat to a better life is the desire to keep the future under control – to make the world predictable by reining in creativity and enterprise. Progress as a neat blueprint, with no deviations and no surprise, may work in children’s cartoons or utopian novels. But it’s just a fantasy.

– Virginia Postrel

The intimate contest for self-command never ends, and lifetime happiness requires finding the right balance between present impulses and future well-being.

– Virginia Postrel

Airline glamour never promised anything as mundane as elbow room, much less a flat bed, a massage, or an arugula salad. It promised a better world. Service and dress reflected the more formal era, but no one expected air travel to be comfortable. It was amazing just to have hot food above the clouds.

– Virginia Postrel

Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of bell curves, and pretty much everyone is on a tail of at least one of them. We may collect strange memorabilia or read esoteric books, hold unusual religious beliefs or wear odd-sized shoes, suffer rare diseases or enjoy obscure movies.

– Virginia Postrel

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 bookstore with 2 million titles, while Netflix promises 35,000 different movies on DVD. Choice is everywhere – liberating to some, but to others, a new source of stress.

– Virginia Postrel

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

Unlike painting, sculpture, or music, typefaces must be useful to someone. Fortunately for designers, the digital age has produced new problems to solve – developing typefaces that work on mobile phones, for one – and enabled better solutions to old problems.

– Virginia Postrel

Loft living is the antithesis of suburban domesticity, if only because the open spaces don’t easily accommodate family life. Lofts also offer residents the opportunity – and responsibility – to structure their own space to reflect what’s important to them.

– Virginia Postrel

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 have a good time. In both cases, our future self will appreciate the help.

– Virginia Postrel

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.

– Virginia Postrel

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

– Virginia Postrel

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

– Virginia Postrel

A standard ‘well woman’ checkup can last as little as 10 minutes, hardly time for any in-depth discussions.

– Virginia Postrel

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.

– Virginia Postrel

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.

– Virginia Postrel

Grassroots techies – the mostly unknown people who write code and start companies that don’t make the headlines – hate, loathe, and despise Microsoft. At technology conferences, it is the devil, or the guaranteed laugh line. Its products are mocked, its business practices booed.

– Virginia Postrel

The Internet exposes a diversity of opinion, experience, and taste we’d been led to believe didn’t exist. If you were unusual in 1950 or 1980 – and everyone is unusual in one way or another – you were an isolated anomaly. Now you’re a Web ring, a Yahoo category.

– Virginia Postrel

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.

– Virginia Postrel

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 but also vintage commercials.

– 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 eradicate the cancerous tissue.

– Virginia Postrel

Religion, art, and science flourish best in a free society. True, freedom does not afford much opportunity for grand gestures. It has little room for martyrs. But life is not supposed to be about dying well. It is about living well.

– Virginia Postrel

The mere existence of ‘Buffy’ proves the declinists wrong about one thing: Hollywood commercialism can produce great art. Complex and evolving characters. Playful language. Joy and sorrow, pathos and elation. Episodes that dare to be different – to tell stories in silence or in song. Big themes and terrible choices.

– Virginia Postrel

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.

– Virginia Postrel

When Baby Boomer women started choosing hotel-like birthing centers over hospital delivery rooms, hospitals quickly wised up. Now even rural hospitals offer well-designed labor-delivery-recovery suites.

– Virginia Postrel

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

– Virginia Postrel

The definition of an ‘operating system’ is bound to evolve with customer demands and technological possibilities.

– Virginia Postrel

Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea.

– Virginia Postrel

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