Thorstein Veblen Quotes
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.
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.
The thief or swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law.
Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows.
The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery
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.
All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.
The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful.
Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.
The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.
The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure.
It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost, and at any risk to the rest of the community.
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
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.
It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life.
There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.
While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.
In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty.
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.
From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.
The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.
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.
So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-respect.
The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
It is much more difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an accession of wealth.
The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe.
Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.
Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. ...Innovation is bad form.
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.
A standard of living is of the nature of habit. ...it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once become habitual.
The corset is?a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitalityand rendering her permanentlyand obviously unfit for work.
Inherited aptitudes and traits of temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's scheme of life.
The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.
Loud dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar.
All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to a judicious use of sabotage.
It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.
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.
Born in inquity and conceived in sin the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and distress.