Thorstein Veblen

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

A protective tariff is a typical conspiracy in restraint of trade.

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

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.

Invention is the mother of necessity.

The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.

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

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.

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

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

The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.

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

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.

In the rare cases where it occurs a failure to increase ones 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.