Quotes by Thorstein Veblen

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


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


Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.


Invention is the mother of necessity.


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


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


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 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.