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
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Pride
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
Topics: Rest, Leisure
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man’s moral nature
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Sports
Invention is the mother of necessity.
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Necessity
No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.
—Thorstein Veblen
Topics: Travel
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
Topics: Profit
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
Topics: Nationalism
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
Topics: Community
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Jane Addams American Social Reformer
Hannah Arendt German-American Political Theorist
Wilhelm Reich Austrian Psychoanalyst
Robert J. Havighurst American Researcher
Thornton Wilder American Novelist, Dramatist
John Dewey American Philosopher
Edward Teller American Nuclear Physicist
Milton Friedman American Economist
Robert Anton Wilson American Polymath
Arthur Rubinstein American Pianist