Thorstein Veblen Quotes

A Rolex watch or an expensive car are the things guys often use to show status, wealth, and basic desirability.

Wealth has never been a sufficient source of honour in itself. It must be advertised, and the normal medium is obtrusively expensive.

The keeping of an idle woman is a badge of superior social status.

As long as there are rich people in the world, they will be desirous of distinguishing themselves from the poor.

Anger is an expensive luxury in which only men of certain income can indulge.

Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.

There was a time when formal clothes were one of life's great pleasures, as well as a way of describing instantly a man's status wealth. Toffs wore the most, the proles the least. Fast forward to 2008 and clothes are still an unrivalled pleasure but some men - and this includes many of our betters - have confused status with fake informality.

The rich follow Wealth, and the Poor the Rich.

The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction.

When you're accustomed to wealth, you don't show it, right? That's why the white kids in school could wear bummy sneakers; it's almost like, 'Don't show wealth - that's crass.'

At least being prosperous set one apart in England; here it guaranteed nothing, not even taste.

A bit of a stomach give a chap a position in society.

The taste of the more recent accessions to the leisure class proper and of the middle and lower classes still requires a pecuniary beauty to supplement the aesthetic beauty, even in those objects which are primarily admired for the beauty that belongs to them as natural growths.

While the proximate ground of discrimination may be of another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of time.

Compromise is low class. I don't have anything against the poor, but being low class is the root of all evil

Social standing does not necessarily translate to social acceptance.

The best by far is to marry in one's own rank.

Aristocracy is a relative thing. And there are plenty of out-of-the-way places where the son of an upholsterer is the arbiter of fashion and reigns over a court like any young Prince of Wales.

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

Dignity, high station, or great riches, are in some sort necessary to old men, in order to keep the younger at a distance, who are otherwise too apt to insult them upon the score of their age.

Rank is a great beautifier.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

Wealth, howsoever got, in England makes lords of mechanics, gentlemen of rakes; Antiquity and birth are needless here; 'Tis impudence and money makes a peer.

This man [Chesterfield], I thought, had been a Lord among wits; but I find he is only a wit among Lords.

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He consumes freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities.