Richard Sennett Quotes & Sayings

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

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

ISBN 978-0-300-11633-5 — Richard Sennett

But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him. (pg-265) — Richard Sennett

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

The single most pressing earthly obligation of every medieval artisan was the establishment of a good personal reputation.11 — Richard Sennett

Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination. — Richard Sennett

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

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

You can't understand how wine is made simply by drinking lots of it. — Richard Sennett

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

The past was in them, still disturbing but no longer a governing history; the trauma strengthened the convictions they possessed about how to lead their lives. — Richard Sennett

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

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

There is something more here than embarrassment at being praised. The strengths 'I' have are not admissible to the arena of ability where they are socially useful; for once admitted, 'I'
my real self
would no longer have them. — Richard Sennett

To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a perception for failure. — Richard Sennett

[There are] code words used today to measure the 'authenticity' of relationships or other persons. We speak of whether we can personally 'relate' to events or other persons, and whether in the relationship itself people are 'open' to one another. The first is a cover word for measuring the other in terms of a mirror of self-concern, and the second is a cover for measuring social interaction in terms of the market exchange of confession. — Richard Sennett

The second trait of narcissism in which asceticism plays a role is blankness. "If only I could feel" - in this formula the self-denial and self-absorption reach a perverse fulfillment. Nothing is real if I cannot feel it, but I can feel nothing. The defense against there being something real outside the self is perfected, because, since I am blank, nothing outside me is alive. In therapy the patient reproaches himself for an inability to care, and yet this reproach, seemingly so laden with self-disgust, is really an accusation against the outside. For the real formula is, nothing suffices to make me feel. Under cover of blankness, there is the more childish plaint that nothing can make me feel if I don't want to, and hidden in the characters of those who truly suffer because they go blank faced with a person or activity they always thought they had desired, there is the secret, unrecognized conviction that other people, or other things as they are, will never be good enough. — Richard Sennett

Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end. — Richard Sennett

The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake. — Richard Sennett