“At the end of the fifteenth century, the poet Thomas Hoccleve declared in The Regiment of Princes, “Allas, wher ys this worldes stabylnesse?”—a lament that appears equally in Homer or in Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Through most of human… — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
“[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… — Richard Sennett Copy Share
“Institutional changes, instead of following the path of a guided arrow, head in different and often conflicting directions: a profitable operating unit is suddenly sold, for example, yet a few years later the parent company tries to get back into the business in which it knew how to make money before it sought to reinvent itself. Such twists have prompted… — Richard Sennett Copy Share
“To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a perception for failure.” — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
“The reigning belief today is that closeness between persons is a moral good. The reigning aspiration today is to develop individual personality through experiences of closeness and warmth with others. The reigning myth today is that the evils of society can all be understood as the evils of impersonality, alienation, and coldness. The sum of these three is an ideology… — Richard Sennett Copy Share
“But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.” — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
“The top managers are defensive about these departures; they point to how safe, attractive, and up-to-date the workplace is. Rodney Everts is less defensive but equally perplexed. “When somebody tells me there’s no future here, I ask what they want. They don’t know; they tell me you shouldn’t be stuck in one place.” Fortunately, the job market in Boston for… — Richard Sennett Copy Share
“Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end.” — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
Tocqueville saw the brute repression of deviants as a necessity if men were to keep convincing themselves of their collective dignity through their collective… — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
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… — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited;… — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards. — Richard Sennett Copy Share Image
