Top 57 Veblen Quotes

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

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #23088
#2. 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

Veblen Quotes #59683
#3. 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

Veblen Quotes #100555
#4. 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

Veblen Quotes #101739
#5. Thorstein Veblen would say people hate squirrels, she called up to him, "because that's the only way to motivate expenditure on them - such as buying traps or guns. It's the same with stirring up patriotic emotionalism, because it justifies expenditures for defense.

Elizabeth Mckenzie

Veblen Quotes #254176
#6. The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #296997
#7. 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

Veblen Quotes #363710
#8. No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #418738
#9. 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

Veblen Quotes #433759
#10. The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #469038
#11. Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #501396
#12. 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

Veblen Quotes #502313
#13. 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.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #573538
#14. 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

Veblen Quotes #593556
#15. Invention is the mother of necessity.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #595135
#16. She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner and his neighbors.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #607662
#17. 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

Veblen Quotes #660127
#18. The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard 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

Veblen Quotes #726976
#19. The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #791291
#20. A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #877666
#21. 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

Veblen Quotes #898339
#22. 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

Veblen Quotes #941890
#23. 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

Veblen Quotes #947657
#24. 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

Veblen Quotes #1041983
#25. Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1086461
#26. The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1123919
#27. Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1151939
#28. 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

Veblen Quotes #1152176
#29. The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe ...

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1188020
#30. Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere - not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!

Sinclair Lewis

Veblen Quotes #1195458
#31. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1220262
#32. The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1247461
#33. In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1311011
#34. Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1320381
#35. 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

Veblen Quotes #1395377
#36. Socialism is a dead horse.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1400955
#37. 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

Veblen Quotes #1405031
#38. 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

Veblen Quotes #1413370
#39. 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

Veblen Quotes #1453637
#40. Based loosely on NASA monkey research, Soviet paranormal studies, chaos theory and the lost experimental writings of Thorstein Veblen, the Faking Smart! Six-Week Program is one of the most advanced six-week programs of its kind.

Martin Fossum

Veblen Quotes #1478580
#41. The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1487920
#42. 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.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1498948
#43. Veblen called it the price-system. Mills called it the Power Elite. It's probably no more than ninety-nine people who don't know what they are doing. They're involved in high finance. Fascinating form of gambling.

John Cage

Veblen Quotes #1527597
#44. 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

Veblen Quotes #1563164
#45. 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.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1611311
#46. 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

Veblen Quotes #1613911
#47. There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1679677
#48. 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

Veblen Quotes #1704773
#49. The corset is?a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitalityand rendering her permanentlyand obviously unfit for work.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1711708
#50. Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar ... Innovation is bad form.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1744963
#51. The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1755521
#52. The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is ... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful.

Thorstein Veblen

Veblen Quotes #1787936
#53. 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

Veblen Quotes #1806398
#54. 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

Veblen Quotes #1817396
#55. 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

Veblen Quotes #1849063
#56. 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

Veblen Quotes #1856547
#57. I think Veblen had an interest in logic.

Stephen Cole Kleene

Veblen Quotes #1863413

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top