To sell something, tell a woman it's a bargain; tell a man it's deductible.
We are more likely to fail as craftsmen due to our inability to organize obsession than because of our lack of ability.
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.
Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.
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.
Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.
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.
Through the damp fabric of my coverall, bundled in my blanket, I feel naked. Raw. He sees more than I want, more than I can bear. It’s like standing before him. . . while he stares at my scars, pitiless and unmoved.
I think my parents were worried when I said I wanted to be an actress, but they also understood what that feeling is like. Maybe if I had shone at anything at school they would have encouraged me to try that, but it has been the only thing I have ever wanted to do.
In diplomacy, clear-cut wins and losses are rare.
The fans in the United States, they are, well, more polite. The fans in Argentina can get, well, crazy.