"It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human."

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With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous waste.

— Thorstein Veblen