Thorstein Veblen

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

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

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 and a conspicuous consumption of goods.

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

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.

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

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