Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Bunde Veblen born Tosten Bunde Veblen, was a Norwegian-American sociologist and economist and a leader of the Efficiency Movement, most famous for his Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

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• It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or withhold the equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by to work out its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.
  • An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace, and the Terms of Its Perpetuation, (1917) p. 168.

• Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
  • The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), ch.iv

• The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.
  • The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 71.

• 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.
  • The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), p. 148.

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• 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.

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

• 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 point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.

• It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.

• Invention is the mother of necessity.
  • This quote is a play on the ancient maxim that "necessity is the mother of invention"; it means that new inventions quickly become necessities to societies that adopt them.

• Labor wants also 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.

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

• Servants should not only show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative that they should show a trained conformity to the canons of conspicuous subservience.

• The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.

• 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.

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

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

• [T]he pulpit [is] the accredited vent for the exudation of effete matter from the cultural organism.

• 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.