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

We never make sport of religion, politics, race or mothers. A mother never gets hit with a custard pie. Mothers-in-law-yes. But mothers-never. — Mack Sennett

In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

There are girls, not specially beautiful, whom you could not lose in a crowd. There are other girls, apparently perfect in beauty, who seem to melt into insignificance. — Mack Sennett

The more Keystone comedies I make, the more convinced I become that comedy is an art, and a high one at that. — Mack 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

The Sennett system of making pictures was actually fun. You never knew what the person next to you was going to do. — Gloria Swanson

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

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

If nothing changes then nothing changes. — C.P. 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

Beloved King of Comedy. — Mack 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

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

I like the days when all the filmmakers had was a film roll, a camera and a gangster. The Mack Sennett comedies were all like that. They'd create little teams to go out and shoot films. — Michel Gondry

Terry Southern is the illegitimate son of Mack Sennett and Edna Saint Vincent Millay. — Kurt Vonnegut

Don't confuse efforts with results.... — C.P. Sennett

Our specialty was exasperated dignity and the discombombulation of Authority. — Mack 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

Being a pioneer can be damn lonely, too early, no money, tough, endless, stupid," Samwer said. "And that healed us. Since then, we basically say, Fuck you. We don't care whether you think we are not smart enough to invent something. — Frank Sennett

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

If Shakespeare were alive today and writing comedy for the movies, he would be the head-liner for the Mack Sennett studios. — Robert Benchley