Thorstein Veblen Quotes

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

"The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before."
-Thorstein Veblen in Questioning quotes.

"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

"Invention is the mother of necessity."
-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 Patriotism quotes.

"The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery."
-Thorstein Veblen in Dogs quotes.

"No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive."
-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

"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 in Economics quotes.

"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