The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Thorstein VeblenRead
The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that a strong obsession with sports reflects an immaturity in moral development.
Thorstein Veblen implies that when individuals become excessively invested in sports, it signifies a stagnation in their ethical growth. Instead of nurturing deeper moral values, the fixation on athletic competition can divert attention from more profound societal issues, indicating a level of developmental delay in understanding and engaging with the complexities of human nature.
In practice
Discussing the impact of sports culture in a school assembly.
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.
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
A right to jury trial is granted to criminal defendants in order to prevent oppression by the Government.
A wise man will see to it that his acts always seem voluntary and not done by compulsion, however much he may be compelled by necessity.
This is the place. Stand still, my steed,- Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.
Liberty is not collective, it is personal. All liberty is individual liberty.
If the mind, that rules the body, ever so far forgets itself as to trample on its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury, but will rise and smite the oppressor.
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