Thorstein Veblen famous quotes

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Beautiful #Respect #Brother

Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Names #Gratification

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Struggle #Effort #Today

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

#Dog #Play #Mastery

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

#Sports #Men #Addiction

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

#Mean #Gentleman #Leisure

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

#Lasts #Analysis #Use

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

#School #Law #Dancing

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Mean #Names #Community

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Idols #Gentleman #Quality

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

#Life #Beautiful #Eye

Invention is the mother of necessity.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Mother #Favourite #Invention

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

#Respect #Decorum #Revulsion

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

#Mistake #Hands #Errors

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

#Community #Risk #Gains

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Patents #May #Requirements

It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or withhold the equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by to work out its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Mean #Work Out #Use

The corset is?a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitalityand rendering her permanentlyand obviously unfit for work.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Purpose #Rendering #Mutilation

Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. ...Innovation is bad form.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Class #Innovation #Characteristics

The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Mean #Noble #Leisure

The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Trends #Systematic #Waste

The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Use #Pay #Masters

In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Mean #Hands #Cases

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Lines #Might #Canon

The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Class #Growth #Taste

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Habit #Standards #Scales

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Eye #Class #Portions

The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to ***** the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Mean #Class #Office

The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Beautiful #Requirements #Norm

The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Possession #Aesthetic

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Aptitude #Habit #Individual

Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Consistency #Maintenance #Tradition

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Escaping #Law #Thieves

These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Character #Expression #Single Life

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

#Would Be

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Self #Community #Waste

The superior excellence imputed to the book, which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes, is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Book #Excellence #Speech

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Business #Self #Emulation

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

#Fashion #Clothes #People

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Eye #Class #Order

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

#Running #Self Esteem #Character

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Patriotism #Politics #Spirit

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Wealth #Scales #Difficult

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Becoming #Elements #Standards

The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Beautiful #Fashion #Expression

A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Tariffs #Libertarian #Typical

As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity-'teleological activity.' He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of being such an agent, he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Men #Effort #Agents

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Hands #Effort #Purpose

The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Class #Leisure #Transition

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Ownership #Arise #Wells

The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Honor #Wealth #Distinction

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.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Self #Complacency #Possession

English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Law #Effort #Requirements

Socialism is a dead horse.
-- Thorstein Veblen

#Horse #Politics #Socialism