Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share Image
The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share Image
The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share Image
In the rare cases where it occurs, a failure to increase one's visible consumption when the means for an increase are at… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share Image
Born in iniquity and conceived in sin, the spirit of nationalism has never ceased to bend human institutions to the service of dissension and… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature. — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
It is much more difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed scale in response… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
A standard of living is of the nature of habit. ...it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
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… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage. — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
“She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
The thief or swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
“The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly,… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
The machine technology takes no cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence; it knows neither manners nor breeding and can make no use of… — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
Loud dress becomes offensive to people of taste, as evincing an undue desire to reach and impress the untrained sensibilities of the vulgar. — Thorstein Veblen Copy Share
