Thorstein Veblen Quotes

Invention is the mother of necessity.

– Thorstein Veblen

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

– 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

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

– 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 dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery.

– 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

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

– Thorstein Veblen

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 only one grew before.

– Thorstein Veblen

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

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

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