Thorstein Veblen's Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Invention is the mother of necessity.

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

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.