Thorstein Veblen
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.Collection: Sports
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.Collection: Strength
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.Collection: Respect
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
Invention is the mother of necessity.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
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.
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
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.
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 dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery.
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 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.Collection: Escaping
The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction.Collection: Honor
The abjectly poor, and all those person whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.Collection: Struggle
Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows.Collection: Running
Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.Collection: Names
No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.Collection: Business
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.Collection: Idols
Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.Collection: Wealth
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.Collection: Business
The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.Collection: Class
The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.Collection: Mean
The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion.Collection: Trends
The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe.Collection: Believe
Socialism is a dead horse.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Doe
The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for masteryCollection: Dog
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.Collection: Eye
The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.Collection: Use
It is much more difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an accession of wealth.Collection: Wealth
As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity-'teleological activity.' He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of being such an agent, he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort.Collection: Men
From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.Collection: Ownership
Into the cultural and technological system of the modern world, the patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings. Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern mankind.Collection: Patriotic
It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost, and at any risk to the rest of the community.Collection: Business
The walking stick serves the purpose of an advertisement that the bearer's hands are employed otherwise than in useful effort, and it therefore has utility as an evidence of leisure.Collection: Hands
The corset is?a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitalityand rendering her permanentlyand obviously unfit for work.Collection: Purpose
So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-respect.Collection: Self
There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.Collection: Respect
The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.Collection: Class
It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life.Collection: Elements
Conservatism, being an upper-class characteristic, is decorous; and conversely, innovation, being a lower-class phenomenon, is vulgar. ...Innovation is bad form.Collection: Class
The superior excellence imputed to the book, which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes, is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech.Collection: Book
The machine technology takes no cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence; it knows neither manners nor breeding and can make no use of any of the attributes of worth.Collection: Technology
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. In an industrial community this propensity for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous waste.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Law
Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.Collection: Consistency
In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty.Collection: Lines