Thorstein Veblen on Predation

“When the predatory habit of life has been settled upon the group by long habituation, it becomes the able-bodied man's accredited office in the social economy or elude him, to overcome and reduce to subservience those alien forces that assert themselves refractorily in the environment.”

“Predation can not become the habitual, conventional resource of any group or any class until industrial methods have been developed to such a degree of efficiency as to leave a margin worth fighting for, above the subsistence of those engaged in getting a living....The early development of tools and of weapons is of course the same fact seen from two different points of view. ...The predatory phase of culture is therefore conceived to come on gradually.”