Thorstein Veblen Short Quotes

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

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

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

Thorstein Veblen
All ritual has a notable tendency to reduce itself to a rehearsal of formulas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thorstein Veblen
In the priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious consumption of time are visible.

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

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

Thorstein Veblen
Under the new order the going concern in production is the plant or shop, the works, not the individual workman.

Thorstein Veblen
The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent.

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

Thorstein Veblen
Enlightened common-sense sticks by the opaque truth and refuses to go behind the returns given by the triangle of facts.

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

Thorstein Veblen
The data with which any scientific inquiry has to do are trivialities in some other bearing than that one in which they are of account.

Thorstein Veblen
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
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
Priestly vestments show, in accentuated form, all the features that have been shown to be evidence of a servile status and a vicarious life.

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

Thorstein Veblen
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
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
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
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