Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Virginia Postrel

American Political and Cultural Writer

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

"The most successful innovations are the ones that we stop noticing almost immediately. We often don’t appreciate the things we would least like to give up."

"Afghan men lined up at barbershops to have their beards shaved off. Women painted their nails with once-forbidden polish. Formerly clandestine beatuy salons opened in prominent locations. Men traded postcards of beautiful Indian movie stars, and thronged to buy imported TVs, VCRs, and videotapes. Even burka merchants diversified their wares, adding colors like brown, peach, and green to the blue and off-white dictated by the Taliban’s whip-wielding virtue police. Freed to travel to city markets, village women demanded better fabric, finer embroidery, and more variety in their traditional garments."

"Glamour is translucent — not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn’t give us a completely clear picture."

"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."

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

"Even the most seemingly materialistic daydreams - the transformed life we imagine in a new dress, a new car, a new house - allow us to rise above the here and now, projecting ourselves into an idealized future. In the process, we learn truths about who we are, what we desire, and who we might become. Those things may matter only to our minds, but that doesn't make them any less valuable or any less real."

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

"Thanks to production and distribution innovations, consumers now have access to far more choices for all kinds of goods and services, from fresh vegetables in the supermarket to DVDs from Netflix... The variety revolution is an economic story, but it has much broader implications for how we think about pluralism and individual differences."

"People want genetic technology because they expect to use it for themselves, to help themselves and their children."

"Progress comes from trial and error, when we're free to try things and free to reject ideas that don't work. That makes me optimistic about the future. The problem comes when people either try to stamp out experimentation or try to cram one possibly hare-brained scheme down everyone's throat."

"The status critique does not actually say luxury is meaningless. To the contrary, the critics' usual argument is that such goods are only about meaning; they are 'objects as rich in meaning as they are low in utility.' The status critique sees only 2 possible sources of value: function and meaning; and it reduces meaning to a single idea: 'I'm better than you.' It denies the existence or importance of aesthetic pleasure and the many meanings and associations that can flow from that pleasure."