Richard Sennett

“[There are] code words used today to measure the 'authenticity' of relationships or other persons. We speak of whether we can personally…

— Richard Sennett

“Institutional changes, instead of following the path of a guided arrow, head in different and often conflicting directions: a profitable operating unit…

— 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

“The reigning belief today is that closeness between persons is a moral good. The reigning aspiration today is to develop individual personality…

— Richard Sennett

“But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.”

— Richard Sennett

“The top managers are defensive about these departures; they point to how safe, attractive, and up-to-date the workplace is. Rodney Everts is…

— Richard Sennett

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

— Richard Sennett

Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.

— Richard Sennett

Tocqueville saw the brute repression of deviants as a necessity if men were to keep convincing themselves of their collective dignity through…

— 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…

— Richard Sennett

Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of…

— Richard Sennett

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

— Richard Sennett

“At the end of the fifteenth century, the poet Thomas Hoccleve declared in The Regiment of Princes, “Allas, wher ys this worldes…

— Richard Sennett

“Who needs me?” is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does…

— Richard Sennett

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

— Richard Sennett

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

— Richard Sennett

“Who needs me?” is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does…

— Richard Sennett

When the press writes scare stories about the global labor supply draining jobs from rich to poor places, the story is usually…

— Richard Sennett

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

— Richard Sennett

“Time was minutely calculated everywhere in the vast plant so that top managers knew precisely what everyone was supposed to be doing…

— Richard Sennett