Thorstein Veblen Quotes

There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.

Labor wants pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful - to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister.

Loud dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar.

The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.

It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost, and at any risk to the rest of the community.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.

The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.

Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.

Invention is the mother of necessity.

The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery

The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.

Socialism is a dead horse.

The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous waste.

The machine technology takes no cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence; it knows neither manners nor breeding and can make no use of any of the attributes of worth.

Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows.

All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.

Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.

The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe.

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.

In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.

Into the cultural and technological system of the modern world, the patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings. Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern mankind.

In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.

Instead of investing in the goods as they pass between producer and consumer, as the merchant does, the businessman now invests in the processes of industry.

No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.

In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.