Conspicuous Consumption Quotes:

I just don't like conspicuous consumption. I find it distasteful.

- Tim Gunn

topic: Consumption, Conspicuous Consumption, Distasteful

The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength, and so of gaining or retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.

- Thorstein Veblen

topic: Mean, Names, Community, Retaining, Conspicuous Consumption

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

- Thorstein Veblen

source: The Theory of the Leisure Class ch. 4 (1899) See Rae 1

topic: Mean, Gentleman, Leisure, Perfect Gentleman, Conspicuous Consumption

In order to stand well in the eyes of the community, it is necessary to come up to a certain, somewhat indefinite, conventional standard of wealth.

- Thorstein Veblen

topic: Eye, Class, Order, Conspicuous Consumption

the conspicuous consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spiritual error, or even bad manners

- Barbara Kingsolver

topic: Spiritual, Errors, Limited Resources, Conspicuous Consumption

Labor wants pride and joy in doing good work, a sense of making or doing something beautiful or useful - to be treated with dignity and respect as brother and sister.

- Thorstein Veblen

topic: Beautiful, Respect, Brother, Mutual Respect, Dignity And Respect

It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost, and at any risk to the rest of the community.

- Thorstein Veblen

topic: Community, Risk, Gains, Conspicuous Consumption

Happiness doesn't lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house-home is a mythological conceit. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.

- Dennis Lehane

topic: Lying, Home, Unconditional Love, Conspicuous Consumption

Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature.

- David W. Orr

topic: Growing Up, Giving, Humanity, Stature, Modern Age

The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of--career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.

- Germaine Greer

topic: Hippie, Ambition, Lifestyle, Dropouts, Conspicuous Consumption

Too much of what led up to the crisis in the old bubble days—the conspicuous consumption, the latter-day Gatsbyism—was fueled by a need to fill a huge emotional and psychological void left by the absence of meaningful work. When people cease to find meaning in work, when work is boring, alienating, and dehumanizing, the only option becomes the urge to consume—to buy happiness off the shelf, a phenomenon we now know cannot suffice in the long term.

- Richard Florida

topic: Meaningful, Emotional, Long, Conspicuous Consumption

All business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.

- Thorstein Veblen

topic: Lasts, Analysis, Use, Sabotage, Conspicuous Consumption

We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption - anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.

- Charles Eisenstein

topic: Hurt, Shopping, Ease, Conspicuous Consumption

In point of substantial merit the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.

- Thorstein Veblen

topic: School, Law, Dancing, Fencing, Law School

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

- Thorstein Veblen

topic: Life, Beautiful, Eye, Conspicuous Consumption

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.

- Thorstein Veblen

source: Thorstein Veblen (1994). “Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times : the Case of America”, p.38, Transaction Publishers

topic: Patriotism, Politics, Spirit, Iniquity, Dissension

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure , the process is its own reward.

- Amelia Earhart

source: "The Official Website of Amelia Earhart/ Quotes". www.ameliaearhart.com.

topic: Inspirational, Decision, Acting, Make The Right Choice, Inspiration And Life

The students [of the 60's] substituted conspicuous compassion for their parents' conspicuous consumption.

- Allan Bloom

source: "The Closing of the American Mind". Book by Allan Bloom, 1987.

topic: Compassion, Parent, Students, Conspicuous Consumption

Hollywood has gone from the capital of conspicuous consumption to the cutting edge of conspicuous conservation.

- Arianna Huffington

topic: Cutting, Hollywood, Gone, Conspicuous Consumption

I write for one and only one purpose, to overcome the invincible ignorance of the traduced heart. […] I wish to speak to and for those who have had enough of the Social Lie, the Economics of Mass Murder, the Sexual Hoax, and the Domestication of Conspicuous Consumption.

- Kenneth Rexroth

source: Preface to the second edition of "The Art of Worldly Wisdom" by Kenneth Rexroth, 1953.

topic: Lying, Ignorance, Writing, Conspicuous Consumption