Thorstein Bunde Veblen (/ˈθɔːrstaɪn ˈvɛblən/; born Torsten Bunde Veblen; July 30, 1857 – August 3, 1929), a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist, became famous as a witty critic of capitalism.
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.
The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe.
The corset is?a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitalityand rendering her permanentlyand obviously unfit for work.
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.
No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.
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.
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.
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.
A standard of living is of the nature of habit. . . . it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once become habitual.
These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole.
In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.
The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery
While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.
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.
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.
Loud dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar.
In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at hand is felt in popular apprehension to call for explanation, and unworthy motives of miserliness are imputed.
Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.