Top 50 Thorstein Veblen Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Thorstein Veblen

2. “Socialism is a dead horse.”

— Thorstein Veblen

3. “Invention is the mother of necessity.”

— Thorstein Veblen

4. “The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.”

— Thorstein Veblen

5. “Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows.”

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

9. “The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.”

— Thorstein Veblen

10. “From the ownership of women the concept of ownership extends itself to include the products of their industry, and so there arises the ownership of things as well as of persons.”

— Thorstein Veblen

11. “Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.”

— Thorstein Veblen

12. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

13. “Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.”

— Thorstein Veblen

14. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

15. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

16. “The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man’s moral nature.”

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

18. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

20. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

21. “The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction.”

— Thorstein Veblen

22. “The machine technology takes no cognizance of conventionally established rules of precedence; it knows neither manners nor breeding and can make no use of any of the attributes of worth.”

— Thorstein Veblen

23. “It frequently happens that an element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life.”

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

25. “The first duty of an editor is to gauge the sentiment of his reader, and then to tell them what they like to believe...”

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

27. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

28. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

29. “The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel; it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.”

— Thorstein Veblen

30. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

31. “English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection.”

— Thorstein Veblen

32. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

33. “The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.”

— Thorstein Veblen

34. “Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.”

— Thorstein Veblen

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

— Thorstein Veblen

36. “Conspicuous abstention from labour therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability; and conversely, since application to productive labour is a mark of poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable standing in the community.”

— Thorstein Veblen

37. “The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow; just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands today.”

— Thorstein Veblen

38. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

39. “As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity – “teleological” activity. He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort.”

— Thorstein Veblen

40. “Inherited aptitudes and traits of temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any individual’s scheme of life.”

— Thorstein Veblen

41. “Instead of investing in the goods as they pass between producer and consumer, as the merchant does, the businessman now invests in the processes of industry.”

— Thorstein Veblen

42. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

43. “In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men’s eyes.”

— Thorstein Veblen

44. “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

45. “In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty.”

— Thorstein Veblen

46. “There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.”

— Thorstein Veblen

47. “The early ascendancy of leisure as a means of reputability is traceable to the archaic distinction between noble and ignoble employments. Leisure is honourable and becomes imperative partly because it shows exemption from ignoble labour.”

— Thorstein Veblen

48. “So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-respect.”

— Thorstein Veblen

49. “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.”

— Thorstein Veblen

50. “She lives with man on terms of equality, knows nothing of that relation of status which is the ancient basis of all distinctions of worth, honor, and repute, and she does not lend herself with facility to an invidious comparison between her owner and his neighbors.”

— Thorstein Veblen