Thorstein Veblen

"Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equip…"

"The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before."

"In the priestly life of all anthropomorphic cults the marks of a vicarious consumption of time are visible."

"The machine process pervades the modern life and dominates it in a mechanical sense. Its dominance is seen in the enforcement of precise mechanical measurements and adjustment and the reduction of all…"

"In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum."

"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."

"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."

"In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's eyes."