Richard Sennett Quotes

• 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

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  59 Copy quote

• Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.

  Richard Sennett

  Imagination, Authority

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  12 Copy quote

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

  Richard Sennett

  Technique, Impossible, Standards

  9 Copy quote

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

  Richard Sennett

  Pleasure, Conversation, Casual

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  9 Copy quote

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