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

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.

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

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.

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

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