Quotes About Veblen

The dog commends himself to our favor by affording play to our propensity for mastery.

McMahon made use of Veblen's conception of emulation in consumption, whereas Kyrk adopted Mitchell's view that notions of rationality derived from business calculation of profit cannot be applied to households controlled by other standards (1923, p. 144).

Thorstein Veblen would say people hate squirrels, she called up to him, "because that's the only way to motivate expenditure on them - such as buying traps or guns. It's the same with stirring up patriotic emotionalism, because it justifies expenditures for defense.

It bothered Veblen's mother that most people were lazy and had given up original thought a long time ago, stealing stale phrases from the media like magpies.

Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere—not enough imagination to want to go anywhere! Getting their music by turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed flabs!

Back in 1921 Veblen had predicted that engineers would one day rule the U.S. economy. He argued that since the economy was premised on technology and the engineers were the only ones who actually understood how the technology worked, they would inevitably use their superior knowledge to seize power from the financiers and captains of industry who wound up on top at the end of the first round of the Industrial Revolution.

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.

I think Veblen had an interest in logic.