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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.

Thorstein Veblen

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Thorstein Veblen
Age: 72 †
Born: 1857
Born: July 30
Died: 1929
Died: August 3
Economist
Sociologist
University Professor
Writer
Manitowoc County
Wisconsin
Thorstein Bunde Veblen
Otherwise
Advertisements
Evidence
Utility
Therefore
Serves
Walking
Employed
Effort
Leisure
Purpose
Stick
Hands
Useful
Bearer
Sticks
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Instead of investing in the goods as they pass between producer and consumer, as the merchant does, the businessman now invests in the processes of industry.
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Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
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The thief or swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law.
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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.
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The office of the leisure class in social evolution is to retard the movement and to conserve what is obsolescent. This proposition is by no means novel it has long been one of the commonplaces of popular opinion.
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The possession of wealth confers honor it is an invidious distinction.
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In aesthetic theory it might be extremely difficult, if not quite impracticable, to draw a line between the canon of classicism, or regard for the archaic, and the canon of beauty.
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No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.
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In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
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The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful.
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Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.
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English orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective its acquisition consumes much time and effort failure to acquire it is easy of detection.
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Invention is the mother of necessity.
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The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.
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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.
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Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.
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