Thorstein Veblen Quotes (16 Quotes)

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Servants should not only show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative that they should show a trained conformity to the canons of conspicuous subservience.

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.

Invention is the mother of necessity.

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.

The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.