Thorstein Veblen Quotes

109 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Thorstein Veblen
Here and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother of necessity.

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

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

Thorstein Veblen
The dog... commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery, and as he is also an item of expense, and commonly serves no industrial purpose, he holds a well-assured place in men's regard as a thing of good repute.

Thorstein Veblen
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
However widely, or equally, or "fairly", it may be distributed, no general increase of the community's wealth can make any approach to satiating this need, the ground of which is the desire of every one to excel every one else in the accumulation of goods.

Thorstein Veblen
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
The very large aggregate value of such assets indicates how imperative it is for the conduct of industrial business under the new order to restrict output within reasonable limits, and at the same time how profitable it is to be able to prevent the excessively high productive capacity of modern industry from outrunning the needs of profitable business. For the prosperity of business it is necessary to keep the output within reasonable limits; that is to say, within such limits as will serve to maintain reasonably profitable prices; that is to say, such prices as will yield the largest obtainable net return to the concerns engaged in the business.

Thorstein Veblen
It is especially the latter-day system of transport and communication as it works out under the new order highly mechanical and exactingly scheduled for time, date and place — that so controls and standardizes the ordinary life of the common man on mechanical lines.

Thorstein Veblen
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
But there are certain vested interests which find their profit in maintaining a tariff barrier as a means of keeping the price up and keeping the supply down; and the common man still faithfully believes that the profits which these vested interests derive in this way from increasing the cost of his livelihood and decreasing the net productivity of his industry will benefit him in some mysterious way.

Thorstein Veblen
All these peoples that now hope to be nations have long been nationalities. A nation is an organization for collective offence and defense, in peace and war, — essentially based on hate and fear of other nations; a nationality is a cultural group, bound together by home-bred affinities of language, tradition, use and wont, and commonly also by a supposed community race, — essentially based on sympathies and sentiments of self-complacency within itself.

Thorstein Veblen
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
Any person with a taste for curiosities of human behavior might well pursue this question of capitalized free income into its further convolutions, and might find reasonable entertainment in so doing. The topic also has merits as a subject for economic theory. But for the present argument it may suffice to note that this free income and the business-like contrivances by which it is made secure and legitimate are of the essence of this new order of business enterprise; that the abiding incentive to such enterprise lies in this unearned income; and that the intangible assets which are framed to cover this line of "earnings," therefore, constitute the substantial core of corporate capital under the new order.

Thorstein Veblen
It is scarcely necessary to describe this modern system of principles that still continues to govern human intercourse among the civilized peoples, or to attempt an exposition of its constituent articles. It is all to be had in exemplary form, ably incorporated in such familiar documents as the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the American Constitution; and it is all to be found set forth with all the circumstance of philosophical and juristic scholarship in the best work of such writers as John Locke. Montesquieu. Adam Smith, or Blackstone.

Thorstein Veblen
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
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
The free income which is capitalized in the intangible assets of the vested interests goes to support the well-to-do investors, who are for this reason called the kept classes, and whose keep consists in an indefinitely extensible consumption of superfluities.

Thorstein Veblen
Within the nation the enlightened principles of self-help and free contract have given rise to vested interests which control the industrial system for their own use and thereby come in for a legal right to the community's net output of product over cost. Each of these vested interests habitually aims to take over as much as it can of the lucrative traffic that goes on and to get as much as it can out of the traffic, at the cost of the rest of the community.

Thorstein Veblen
The need of conspicuous waste... stands ready to absorb any increase in the community's industrial efficiency or output of goods.

Thorstein Veblen
As increased industrial efficiency makes it possible to procure the means of livelihood with less labor, the energies of the industrious members of the community are bent to the compassing of a higher result in conspicuous expenditure, rather than slackened to a more comfortable pace.

Thorstein Veblen
Wealth is now itself intrinsically honorable and confers honor on its possessor.

Thorstein Veblen