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Richard Sennett Quotes

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.

Richard Sennett
Jobs, Names, Desire
Richard Sennett (2009). “The Craftsman”, p.17, Penguin UK

Our modern economy privileges pure profit, momentary transactions and rapid fluidity. Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to objectify experience and also to slow down labor. It is not about quick transactions or easy victories. That slow tempo of craftwork, of taking the time you need to do something well, is profoundly stabilizing to individuals.

Richard Sennett
Victory, Needs, Roles

We are more likely to fail as craftsmen due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.

Richard Sennett
Inability, Obsession, Failing

Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.

Richard Sennett
Imagination, Authority

When the press writes scare stories about the global labor supply draining jobs from rich to poor places, the story is usually presented as a "race to the bottom" simply in terms of wages. Capitalism supposedly looks for labor wherever labor is cheapest. This story is half wrong. A kind of cultural selection is also at work, so that jobs leave high-wage countries like the United States and Germany, but migrate to low-wage economies with skilled, sometimes overqualified workers.

Richard Sennett
Country, Jobs, Writing
Richard Sennett (2007). “The Culture of the New Capitalism”, p.87, Yale University Press

Tocqueville saw the brute repression of deviants as a necessity if men were to keep convincing themselves of their collective dignity through their collective sameness. The "poets of society," the men who challenged the norms, would have to be silenced so that sameness could be maintained.

Richard Sennett
Men, Saws, Dignity

The pleasures of relaxed chat, of casual conversation, encourage the ethnographer in everyone

Richard Sennett
Pleasure, Conversation, Casual

Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards.

Richard Sennett
Technique, Impossible, Standards

Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited; if the Romans consulted the heavens for guidance in this effort, the city fathers of New York consulted the banks.

Richard Sennett
New York, Father, Land

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