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

Invention is the mother of necessity.

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 quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of...

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

The ceremonial differentiation of the dietary is best seen in the use of intoxicating beverages and narcotics. If these articles of consumption are costly, they are felt to be noble and honorific. Therefore the base...

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

As Thorstein Veblen correctly surmised over a century ago, the failure of economics to become an evolutionary science is the product of the optimizing framework of the underlying paradigm, which is inherently antithetical to the...

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.

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

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

Servants should not only show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative that they should show a trained conformity to the canons of conspicuous subservience.

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

[T]he pulpit [is] the accredited vent for the exudation of effete matter from the cultural organism.

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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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