Quotes by Thorstein Veblen

About Thorstein Veblen:

Thorstein Bunde Veblen is credited for the main technical principle used by institutional economists, known as the Veblenian dichotomy. It is a distinction between what Veblen called "institutions" and "technology". Besides his technical work, Veblen was a popular and witty critic of capitalism, as illustrated by his best-known book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).
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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

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

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 ...

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 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

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

Invention is the mother of necessity.

Thorstein Veblen

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

Thorstein Veblen

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

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

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 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 consum...

Thorstein Veblen

Author Bio

  • NameThorstein Veblen
  • DescriptionAmerican academic
  • BornJuly 30, 1857
  • DiedAugust 3, 1929
  • CountryUnited States Of America; Norway
  • ProfessionEconomist; Sociologist