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Thorstein Veblen Quotes

1857–1929 United States

Thorstein Bunde Veblen (30 July 1857 – 3 August 1929) was a Norwegian-American sociologist and economist and a leader of the Efficiency Movement, most famous for The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).

United States
Academics
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Economists
Non-fiction authors

Also known as: Veblen, Veblen, Thorstein

Random Thorstein Veblen quote

45 quotes

Without much preliminary exposition and without feeling himself to be out of touch with his contemporaries, Darwin set to work to explain species in terms of the process out of which they have arisen, rather than out of the prime cause to which the distinction between them may he due.

The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904)

When the predatory habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in the social economy or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the environment.

Whatever the common-sense of earlier generations may have held in this respect, modern common-sense holds that the scientist's answer is the only ultimately true one. In the last resort enlightened common-sense sticks by the opaque truth and refuses to go behind the returns given by the triangle of facts.

The aversion to change is in large part an aversion to the bother of making the readjustment which any given change will necessitate; and this solidarity of the system of institutions of any given culture or of any given people strengthens the instinctive resistance offered to any change in men's habits of thought, even in matters which, taken by themselves, are of minor importance.

This requirement of mechanical accuracy and nice adaptation to specific uses has led to a gradual pervading enforcement of uniformity to a reduction to staple grades and staple character in the materials handled, and to a thorough standardizing of tools and units of measurement. Standard physical measurements are of the essence of the machine's régime.

The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thorstein Veblen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.