Richard Sennett > Quotes

“Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“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 evils of impersonality, alienation, and coldness. The sum of these three is an ideology of intimacy: social relationships of all kinds are real, believable, and authentic the closer they approach the inner psychological concerns of each person. This ideology transmutes political categories into psychological categories. This ideology of intimacy defines the humanitarian spirit of a society without gods: warmth is our god. The history of the rise and fall of public culture at the very least calls this humanitarian spirit into question. The belief in closeness between persons as a moral good is in fact the product of a profound dislocation which capitalism and secular belief produced in the last century. Because of this dislocation, people sought to find personal meanings in impersonal situations, in objects, and in the objective conditions of society itself. They could not find these meanings; as the world became psychomorphic, it became mystifying. They therefore sought to flee, and find in the private realms of life, especially in the family, some principle of order in the perception of personality. Thus the past built a hidden desire for stability in the overt desire for closeness between human beings. Even as we have revolted against the stern sexual rigidities of the Victorian family, we continue to burden close relations with others with these hidden desires for security, rest, and permanence. When the relations cannot bear these burdens, we conclude there is something wrong with the relationship, rather than with the unspoken expectations. Arriving at a feeling of closeness to others is thus often after a process of testing them; the relationship is both close and closed. If it changes, if it must change, there is a feeling of trust betrayed. Closeness burdened with the expectation of stability makes emotional communication—hard enough as it is—one step more difficult. Can intimacy on these terms really be a virtue?”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“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 Craftsman

“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, The Fall of Public Man

“Who needs me?” is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between risk and reward. It radiates indifference in the organization of absence and trust, where there is no reason to be needed. And it does so through reengineering of institutions in which people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others. It could be said that capitalism was always thus. But not in the same way. The indifference of the old class-bound capitalism was starkly material; the indifference which radiates out of flexible capitalism is more personal because the system itself is less starkly etched, less legible in form.”
― Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

“you can’t understand how wine is made simply by drinking lots of it.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“A healthy obsession, we could say, interrogates its own driving convictions.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“the built environment is one thing, how people dwell in it another.”
― Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City

“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 Craftsman

“Το αίσθημα του "εμείς", το οποίο εκφράζει την επιθυμία να είμαστε όμοιοι, είναι ένας τρόπος να αποφεύγουν οι άνθρωποι την ανάγκη να κοιτάξουν βαθύτερα ο ένας μέσα στον άλλον”
― Richard Sennett

“To accept life in its disjointed pieces is an adult experience of freedom, but still these pieces must lodge and embed themselves somewhere, hopefully in a place that allows them to grow and endure.”
― Richard Sennett

“city’ meant two different things – one a physical place, the other a mentality compiled from perceptions, behaviours and beliefs.”
― Richard Sennett, Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City

“Who needs me?” is a question of character which suffers a radical challenge in modern capitalism. The system radiates indifference. It does so in terms of the outcomes of human striving, as in winner-take-all markets, where there is little connection between risk and reward. It radiates indifference in the organization of absence of trust, where there is no reason to be needed. And it does so through reengineering of institutions in which people are treated as disposable. Such practices obviously and brutally diminish the sense of mattering as a person, of being necessary to others.”
― Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

“هەر تاکێک پاشەکشە دەکاتەوە بۆ هەناوی خۆی، بە شێوازێک هەڵسووکەوت دەکات کە بە چارەنووسی هەمووان بێگانەیە. لای ئەو هەموو مڕۆڤ دەبنە هاوڕێکانی و مناڵەکانی. لە نێوان هاو وڵاتانی بە چەشنێک هات و چوو دەکات ڕەنگە لەگەڵیان تێکەڵ ببێت، بەڵام نایانبینێت، لێیان نزییک دەبێتەوە بەڵام هەست بە بوونیان ناکات. تەنیا لە ناو خۆی و بۆ خۆی بوونی هەیە و ئەگەر لەم دۆخەدا تەنانەت شتێک بە ناوی بنەماڵە لە زەینی‌دا مابێتەوە شتێک بە ناوی کۆمەڵگا قەت نەماوە”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“Time was minutely calculated everywhere in the vast plant so that top managers knew precisely what everyone was supposed to be doing at a given moment. Bell was struck, for instance, by how General Motors “divides the hour into ten six-minute periods…the worker is paid by the numbers of tenths of an hour he works.”27 This minute engineering of work time was connected to very long measures of time in the corporation as well. Seniority pay was finely tuned to the total number of hours a man or woman had worked for General Motors; a laborer could minutely calculate benefits of vacation time and sick leave. The micrometrics of time governed the lower echelons of white-collar offices as well as manual labor on the assembly line, in terms of promotion and benefits.”
― Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

“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 history, people have accepted the fact that their lives will shift suddenly due to wars, famines, or other disasters, and that they will have to improvise in order to survive. Our parents and grandparents were filled with anxiety in 1940, having endured the wreckage of the Great Depression and facing the looming prospect of a world war.”
― Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

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

“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 of intimacy: social relationships of all kinds are real, believable, and authentic the closer they approach the inner psychological concerns of each person. This ideology transmutes political categories into psychological categories. This ideology of intimacy defines the humanitarian spirit of a society without gods; warmth is our god.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“the single most pressing earthly obligation of every medieval artisan was the establishment of a good personal reputation."11”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“Thus narcissism is an obsession with “what this person, that event means to me.” This question about the personal relevance of other people and outside acts is posed so repetitively that a clear perception of those persons and events in themselves is obscured. This absorption in self, oddly enough, prevents gratification of self needs; it makes the person at the moment of attaining an end or connecting with another person feel that “this isn’t what I wanted.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man

“Developments in high technology reflect an ancient model for craftsmanship, but the reality on the ground is that people who aspire to be good craftsmen are depressed, ignored, or misunderstood by social institutions. These ills are complicated because few institutions set out to produce unhappy workers. People seek refuge in inwardness when material engagement proves empty; mental anticipation is privileged above concrete encounter; standards of quality in work separate design from execution.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“In cultural production, Levi-Strauss famously declares, food is both good to eat (bonne a manger) and good to think with (bonne a penser). He means this literally: cooking food begets the idea of heating for other purposes; people who share parts of a cooked deer begin to think they can share parts of a heated house; the abstraction "he is a warm person" (in the sense of "sociable") then becomes possible to think.14 These are domain shifts.”
― Richard Sennett, The Craftsman

“İyi bir işin nitelikleriyle iyi bir karakterin nitelikleri artık örtüşmüyordu.”
― Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

“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

“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.”
― Sennett, Richard and Cobb, Jonathan

“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 the sociologists Scott Lash and John Urry to speak more largely of flexibility as “the end of organized capitalism.”
― Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism

“The rise of the bourgeoisie” is a hackneyed phrase, so much so that one historian has been moved to comment that the only historical constant is that the middle classes are always everywhere rising.”
― Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man