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Thorstein Veblen - From the Activity category:
As a matter of selective necessity, man is an agent. He is, in his own apprehension, a centre of unfolding impulsive activity-'teleological activity.' He is an agent seeking in every act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of being such an agent, he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Beauty category:
Beauty is commonly a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Books category:
The superior excellence imputed to the book, which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes, is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Fashion category:
The changing styles are the expression of a restless search for something which shall commend itself to our aesthetic sense; but as each innovation is subject to the selective action of the norm of conspicuous waste, the range within which innovation can take place is somewhat restricted. The innovation must not only be more beautiful, or perhaps oftener less offensive, than that which it displaces, but it must also come up to the accepted standard of expensiveness. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Habit category:
These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Life category:
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)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Motivation category:
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 Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Possessions category:
The aesthetic serviceability of objects of beauty is not greatly nor universally heightened by possession. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Prosperity category:
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. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Research category:
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Thought category:
The individual's habits of thought make an organic complex, the trend of which is necessarily in the direction of serviceability to the life process. When it is attempted to assimilate systematic waste or futility, as an end in life, into this organic complex, there presently supervenes a revulsion. (Thorstein Veblen)
Thorstein Veblen - From the Tradition category:
Conservatism is the maintenance of conventions already in force. (Thorstein Veblen)
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