Thorstein Veblen - Modern Quotes

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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 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 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
The intellectual life of modern Europe and its cultural dependencies differs notably from what has gone before. There is all about it an air of matter-of-fact both in its technology and in its science; which culminates in a "mechanistic conception" of all those things with which scientific inquiry is concerned and in the light of which many of the dread realities of the Middle Ages look like superfluous make-believe.

Thorstein Veblen
By and large, this eighteenth-century stabilized modern point of view has governed men's dealings within this era, and its constituent principles of right and honest living must therefore, presumptively, be held answerable for the disastrous event of it all, — at least to the extent that they have permissively countenanced the growth of those sinister conditions which have now ripened into a state of world-wide shame and confusion.

Thorstein Veblen
In the modern industrial communities... the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous... that the consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the required manner without help.

Thorstein Veblen
Ever since these enlightened principles of the modern point of view were first installed in the eighteenth century as the self-evident rule of reason in civilized life, the industrial arts have also continued to gain in productive efficiency, at an ever-accelerated rate of gain; so that today the industrial methods of the machine era are highly productive, beyond any earlier state of the industrial arts or anything that is known outside the range of this new order of industry. The output of this industrial system yields a wider margin of net product over cost than has ever been obtainable by any other or earlier known method of work. It consequently affords ground for an uncommonly substantial vested interest in this disposable net margin.

Thorstein Veblen
In later times, and particularly in modern times and in the civilized countries, those immemorial principles of privilege equitably vested in the master class have fallen into discredit as being not sufficiently grounded in fact; so that mastery and servitude are disallowed and have disappeared from the range of legitimate institutions. The enlightened principles of self-help and personal equality do not tolerate these things. However, they do tolerate free income from investments. Indeed, the most consistent and most reputable votaries of the modern point of view commonly subsist on such income.

Thorstein Veblen
In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

Thorstein Veblen
The system of free competition, self-help, equal opportunity and free bargaining which is contemplated by the modern point of view, assumes an industrial situation in which the work and trading of any given individual or group can go on freely by itself, without materially helping or hindering the equally untrammeled working of the rest.

Thorstein Veblen
To modern civilized men, especially in their intervals of sober reflection, all these things that distinguish the barbarian civilizations seem of dubious value... futile in comparison with the achievements of science.

Thorstein Veblen