Thorstein Veblen quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Veblen Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Thorstein Veblen on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

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

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

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

Invention is the mother of necessity.

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

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

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

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

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 aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.

Socialism is a dead horse.

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

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

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.

Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.

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