Thorstein Veblen

"The use of intoxicating beverages is an economic phenomenon of signal importance."

"Intellectual activity undertaken in the service of a specific class interest is ideology, not knowledge."

"The motive of subsistence is but the beginning of economic activity; emulation is its prime driver."

"The canons of taste, however arbitrary, exercise a binding force on human conduct."

"Ownership is a matter of institutional fact, not natural right."

"The predatory temperament is not extinguished but merely sublimated in the business mind."

"Intelligent thought must be grounded in the habitually experienced phenomena of everyday life."

"The institution of private ownership is not immutable but a creature of circumstance."

"Fashion is a contrivance for exempting the wearer from the necessity of being respectable."

"The penalty for non-conformity is exile from the good opinion of one's peers."

"Pecuniary strength is the basis of social and political power in modern communities."

"The instinct of workmanship wars perpetually against the acquisitive instinct."

"The development of technology has outpaced the development of human institutions."

"Industrial activity and economic organization are expressions of a nation's culture."

"The credulous are everywhere; the skeptic is rare and much disliked."

"Hostility toward established institutions is the mark of the intelligent mind."

"The theory of the leisure class is a theory of social stratification."

"Vulgarity is the mark of success in the pecuniary culture."

"The discipline of machine industry becomes the discipline of the human intellect."

"What is called knowledge is often merely the prejudices of a particular era."

"Economic stagnation results from the triumph of pecuniary interests over industrial interests."

"The ceremonial aspects of social life are its most rigid and inflexible elements."

"The making of money is in a sense the making of enemies."

"Warfare and predation are the original forms of economic competition."

"The parasitic leisure class survives only because productive labor supports its idleness."

"Innovation proceeds most readily where established precedent has least force."

"The emulation of the strong by the weak is the mechanism of social change."

"Modern business enterprise is a system of organized waste and conspicuous display."

"The human mind is a machine for the classification and comparison of sensations."

"Patriotism is the refuge of the morally bankrupt leadership class."