Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Sticks
Advertisement
Otherwise
Advertisements
Evidence
Utility
Therefore
Serves
Walking
Employed
Effort
Leisure
Purpose
Stick
Hands
Useful
Bearer

More quotes by Thorstein Veblen

Image
Invention is the mother of necessity.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
Inherited aptitudes and traits of temperament count for quite as much as length of habituation in deciding what range of habits will come to dominate any individual's scheme of life.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
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.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
No one travelling on a business trip would be missed if he failed to arrive.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
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 Veblen
Image
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.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
The requirement of conspicuous wastefulness is... present as a constraining norm selectively shaping and sustaining our sense of what is beautiful.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
Into the cultural and technological system of the modern world, the patriotic spirit fits like dust in the eyes and sand in the bearings. Its net contribution to the outcome is obscuration, distrust, and retardation at every point where it touches the fortunes of modern mankind.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
The possession of wealth confers honor it is an invidious distinction.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
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.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
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.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
The domestic life of most classes is relatively shabby, as compared with the éclat of that overt portion of their life that is carried on before the eyes of observers.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
A standard of living is of the nature of habit. ...it acts almost solely to prevent recession from a scale of conspicuous expenditure that has once become habitual.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
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.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.
Thorstein Veblen
Image
The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.
Thorstein Veblen