Thorstein Veblen

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.

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.

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

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.

It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community.

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.

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