Leisure Class Quotes

The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic leader of a number of men who possess more than the average share of leisure, brutality, and stupidity. The next step is to fascinate fools and muzzle the intelligent, by emotional excitement on the one hand and terrorism on the other.

Democracy divides people into workers and loafers. It makes no provision for those who have no time to work.

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class.

Those who have least to do are generally the most busy people in the world.

I think I need a little break. I've got a two-year old. I'll be part of The Leisure Class for a while.

The streets were full of insane & dull people. Most of them lived in nice houses and didn't seem to work, and you wondered how they did it.

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

I think Veblen had an interest in logic.

… hundreds of gentlemen standing there with no other occupation than shaking the dust from their cigars.

Lord Salisbury constitutes himself the spokesman of a class, of the class to which he himself belongs, who'toil not neither do they spin'.

It is most important that we should keep in this country a certain leisured class. I am of the opinion of the ancient Jewish book which says there is no wisdom without leisure.

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

The purely emotional form of Pietism is, as Ritschl has pointed out, a religious dilettantism for the leisure class.

[T]hroughout the ages to be educated meant to be unproductive.... our word "school" - and its equivalent in all European languages - derives from a Greek word meaning "leisure.

The leisure class is one in which individuals have sufficient economic security and sufficient leisure to find opportunity for a variety of satisfactions in life.

The idea of elegance and aristocratic indulgence of an ocean cruise was born out of the image of the rich men and women who ruled the British Empire slowly sailing to India and the Far East while sipping gin and tonic on deck - served by men in white jackets.

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot Some such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American life.

It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.

I don’t work. I merely inflict myself on the public.

…those are called gentlemen who live idly in abundance from the returns of their possessions without having any care either for cultivation or for other necessary trouble in living. Such are pernicious in every republic and in every province, but more pernicious are those who, beyond the aforesaid fortunes, command from a castle and have subjects to obey them.

Nothing is quite so wretchedly corrupt as an aristocracy which has lost its power but kept its wealth and which still has endless leisure to devote to nothing but banal enjoyments. All its great thoughts and passionate energy are things of the past, and nothing but a host of petty, gnawing vices now cling to it like worms to a corpse.

Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity... Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives there was doubtless a real past, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.

There will always be ladies who lunch. Always. And apparently they live a long time.

Many older wealthy families have learned to instill a sense of public service in their offspring. But newly affluent middle-classparents have not acquired this skill. We are using our children as symbols of leisure-class standing without building in safeguards against an overweening sense of entitlement--a sense of entitlement that may incline some young people more toward the good life than toward the hard work that, for most of us, makes the good life possible.