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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.

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
Transition
Emerged
Institutions
Barbarism
Habit
Gradually
Class
Institution
Life
Consistently
Primitive
Peaceable
Leisure
Warlike
Precisely
Savagery

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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.
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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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The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession.
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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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There are few things that so touch us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum.
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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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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.
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The visible imperfections of hand-wrought goods, being honorific, are accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
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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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In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes.
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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.
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Only individuals with an aberrant temperament can in the long run retain their self-esteem in the face of the disesteem of their fellows.
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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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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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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.
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Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
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So soon as the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem, therefore, it becomes also a requisite to that complacency which we call self-respect.
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Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force.
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Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.
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