Below are some quotations I selected for Thorstein Veblen to go on an
economist's calendar.  If any of you have any "better" selections
please let me know.


A few ground rules for the discussion:

	1. Space is limited, so please accompany any suggested quotation
with a suggestion of which quotation to cut.

	2. The new quotation can be no longer than the cut quotation.
	
	3. Please give the source for any quotation you give--I will have to
get permissions for each.

David Colander



Thorstein Veblen

Indeed except for a stubborn prejudice to the contrary, the fact 
should be readily seen that the boards (of university trustees) are 
of no material use in any connection; their sole effectual function 
being to interfere with the academic management in matters that are 
not of the nature of business, and that lie outside their competence 
and outside the range of their habitual interest.  The Higher 
Learning in America (Stanford, Academic Reprints, 1954, p. 66

The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightening calculator 
of pleasure and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of 
desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about 
the area, but leave him intact. He has neither antecedent nor 
consequent. He is an isolated, definitive human datum in stable 
equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that 
displace him in one direction or another. Self-imposed in elemental 
space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the 
parallelogram of forces bears down upon him, whereupon he follows the 
line of the resultant. When the force of the impact is spent, he 
comes to rest, a self-contained globule of desire as before. ("Why is 
Economics Not an Evolutionary Science?" in The Place of Modern 
Science in Modern Civilization, (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919, 73-74.)

Human nature being what it is, the struggle of each to possess more 
than his neighbor is inseparable from the institution of private 
property. The inference seems to be that there can be no peace from 
this-it must be admitted-ignoble form of emulation, or from the 
discontent that goes with it, this side of the abolition of private 
property. "The Theory of Socialism" in The Place of Science in Modern 
Civilization, p. 391.