The institution of a leisure ...

The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.
The institution of a leisure class has emerged gradually during the transition from primitive savagery to barbarism; or more precisely, during the transition from a peaceable to a consistently warlike habit of life.
 Thorstein Veblen

More phrases

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
 William Tecumseh Sherman
The same mentality that leads to environmental despoliation, environmental destruction, also leads to damage to people.
 Naomi Oreskes
You can't break poor people mentality. Once you grow up poor, you don't take anything for granted. It can have the negative side also because you can never truly be relaxed.
 Will Smith
The man with the average mentality, but with control, with a definite goal, and a clear conception of how it can be gained, and above all, with the power of application and labor, wins in the end.
 William Howard Taft
I think society had to grow up to the mentality of Peter Norman.
 John Carlos

Quotes from the same author

Invention is the mother of necessity.
 Thorstein Veblen
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.
 Thorstein Veblen
The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay.
 Thorstein Veblen
It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or withhold the equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by to work out its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.
 Thorstein Veblen
Abstention from labor is the conventional evidence of wealth and is therefore the conventional mark of social standing.
 Thorstein Veblen