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Virginia Postrel Quotes
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Friendship Quotes
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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 Quotes)
People without children do have the freedom to do things that caring parents with dependent kids can’t - to work long hours, to travel frequently, to relocate, and to do all these things on short notice if necessary. In return, they can achieve positions that devoted parents can’t. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
Like John Kennedy in 1960, Obama combines youth, vigor, and good looks with the promise of political change. Like Kennedy, he grew up in unusual circumstances that distance him from ordinary American life. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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 Quotes)
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. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
From the days of biplanes and silk scarves, the aviator has been the archetype of masculine glamour. Aviators have personified national ideals, from French elan to Soviet party discipline. They’ve inspired lust and admiration. They’ve turned sunglasses and short, utilitarian leather jackets into fashion statements. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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 Quotes)
In the fall of 1978, I left the religious, conservative, biracial, slow-paced culture of South Carolina for the secular, liberal, multi-ethnic, intense culture of Princeton University. Like most immigrants, I was looking for a better life in a place I only half understood. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
Neon signs don’t consume much power, but they look like they do. A cousin of fluorescent lighting, neon is actually quite energy efficient. A neon tube glows coolly when high-voltage, low-amperage electrical power excites the gas within it. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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 Quotes)
Cable companies aren’t bad because they’re parts of unwieldy media conglomerates. They’re bad because they’re monopolies (even where they are no longer legally exclusive) and because the government policies that made them monopolies rewarded lobbying over customer service. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
Our eyes and brains pretty consistently like some human forms better than others. Shown photos of strangers, even babies look longer at the faces adults rank the best-looking. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
The Elgin Marbles were supposed to be on the Parthenon. For many works of art, a museum is an artificial setting - a zoo, not a natural habitat. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
Behind the criticism of fashion as an artistic medium is a highly ideological prejudice: against markets, against consumers, against the dynamism of Western commercial society. The debate is not about art but about culture and economics. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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 Quotes)
Barack Obama has brought glamour back to American politics - not the faux glamour-by-association of campaigning with movie stars or sailing with the Kennedys, but the real thing. The candidate himself is glamorous. Audiences project onto him the personal qualities and political positions they want in a president. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
When ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ premiered on the WB Network in 1996, American culture was in trouble. Americans were bowling alone, pursuing individual interests to the detriment of the communal good. Business leaders were celebrating creativity and neglecting discipline. Nike’s ‘Just do it’ ads were teaching young people to break the rules. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
Before it became a ubiquitous part of urban life, Starbucks was, in most American cities, a radically new idea. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
We’ve gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your establishment can’t come up with an original look, customers expect at least some sleek wood fixtures, nicely upholstered chairs, and faux-Murano glass pendant lights. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
The glamour of twentieth-century air travel helped to persuade once-fearful travelers to take to the skies and encouraged parochial Americans to go out and see the world. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
The glamour of air travel - its aspirational meaning in the public imagination - disappeared before its luxury did, dissipating as flying gradually became commonplace. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
Although people often equate them, glamour is not the same as beauty, stylishness, luxury, celebrity, or sex appeal. It is not limited to fashion or film; nor is it intrinsically feminine. It is not a collection of aesthetic markers - a style, as fashion and design use the word. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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 appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion. (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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 Quotes)
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 (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
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 (Virginia Postrel Quotes)
The impulse for personal adornment is hard to stamp out (Virginia Postrel Quotes)