Richard Sennett famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Technique #Impossible #Standards
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
Our modern economy privileges pure profit, momentary transactions and rapid fluidity. Part of craftâ€™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
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
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
The pleasures of relaxed chat, of casual conversation, encourage the ethnographer in everyone
-- Richard Sennett

#Pleasure #Conversation #Casual
Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.
-- Richard Sennett

#Jobs #Names #Desire
Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.
-- Richard Sennett

#Imagination #Authority
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

If you obey the technique to perfection, that technique will become invisible.
What surprises me most in architecture, as in other techniques, is that a project has one life in its built state but another in its written or drawn state.
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down.
There's lots about politics I don't feel comfortable with. To talk about the politics of future ideas is impossible in soundbite form.
I'm from the South, so while I personally find it impossible to live there, I still have a fondness for it as a geographical region.
...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
Future orientation is combined with a notion and expectation of progress, and nothing is impossible.
It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
Labor is the true standard of value.
I'm shocked at the sexism and double standard coming out of the far right.

Richard Sennett famous quotes

You may also like: