The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
Thorstein VeblenRead
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The display of luxury items serves as a way for wealthy individuals to assert their status and reputation.
In this quote, Thorstein Veblen highlights how the ostentatious display of luxury goods is not just about material possession, but rather a reflection of social status and a means to achieve respectability among peers. This behavior of conspicuously consuming valuable items is often associated with individuals who have leisure time and wealth, emphasizing the intersection of economics, social class, and culture.
Themes
ConsumptionLuxuryStatusWealthSocietyReputation
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on consumer behavior at a business seminar.
More from Thorstein Veblen
All quotes βIn 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 VeblenRead
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 VeblenRead
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 VeblenRead
In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
Thorstein VeblenRead
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 VeblenRead
Similar quotes
Perhaps evil is the crucible of goodness... and perhaps even Satan - Satan, in spite of himself - somehow serves to work out the will of God.
William Peter BlattyRead
Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.
Judith ButlerRead
No period of history has ever been great or ever can be that does not act on some sort of high, idealistic motives, and idealism in our time has been shoved aside, and we are paying the penalty for it.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
It is only our deeds that reveal who we are.
Carl JungRead
Our men think earning money and ordering around others is where power lies. They don't think power is in the hands of the woman who takes care of everyone all day long, and gives birth to their children.
Malala YousafzaiRead
For those who stubbornly seek freedom, there can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the system of 'brainwashing under freedom' to which we are subjected and which all too often we serve as willing or unwitting instruments.
Noam ChomskyRead