Thorstein Veblen

"The accumulation of artifacts serves primarily as a display of purchasing power."

"Scientific truth is merely current consensus among the competent observers."

"The institutions we inherit are invariably adapted to circumstances that no longer obtain."

"Economic behavior is fundamentally a matter of habit and convention, not rational choice."

"The leisure class is a museum of archaic motives and practices."

"Technological advancement creates ever-greater distances between human needs and economic organization."

"The discipline required for industrial competence is incompatible with leisure-class pretension."

"Respectability is a costly undertaking for those without inherited wealth."

"The religious impulse is fundamentally an expression of social anxiety about status."

"Evolution proceeds not through the survival of the best but through the survival of the survivors."

"The machine is the matrix of modern thought and social organization."

"Wealth that is not visibly consumed is wealth wasted in the eyes of society."

"The canons of respectability change, but the impulse to respectability remains constant."

"Modern industry requires habits of thought incompatible with feudal traditions and religious dogma."

"The accumulation of capital is less motivated by productive necessity than by competitive emulation."

"Custom is the most conservative of all forces in human society."

"The businessman is a predator wearing the mask of the industrialist."

"Intellectual honesty requires the acknowledgment that our knowledge is always provisional."

"The institution of property is the foundation upon which all other inequalities rest."

"Industrial efficiency is hampered by the persistence of archaic social institutions."

"The leisure of the rich is a form of conspicuous parasitism."

"Human nature is not fixed but plastic, shaped by institutional forces."

"The competitive struggle is not for survival but for prestige and social standing."

"Advertising is the art of making people want what they do not need with money they do not have."

"The evolution of human institutions follows no predetermined pattern but emerges from unconscious adaptation."

"Financial success is largely a matter of being born into financial success."

"The trained incapacity of the credentialed expert is often the enemy of practical wisdom."

"Emulation is the fundamental economic motive underlying all civilized societies."

"The gentleman of leisure is obsolete, yet his institutional legacy persists."

"What we call tradition is often merely the prejudices of dead ancestors."