Emily Maxson > Emily's Quotes

“There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outward and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile. Not surprisingly, it is the office rather than the job site that has seen the advent of speech codes, diversity workshops, and other forms of higher regulation. Some might attribute this to the greater mixing of the sexes in the office, but I believe a more basic reason is that when there is no concrete task that rules the job—an autonomous good that is visible to all—then there is no secure basis for social relations. Maintaining consensus and preempting conflict become the focus of management, and as a result everyone feels they have to walk on eggshells. Where no appeal to a carpenter’s level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary.34”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“getting an adequate grasp on the world, intellectually, depends on our doing stuff in it.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“I like to fix motorcycles more than I like to wire houses (even though I could make about twice as much money wiring houses).9 Both practices have internal goods that engage my attention, but fixing bikes is more meaningful because not only the fixing but also the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence. People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“A regard for human excellence is the aristocratic ethos. To speak of aristocracy is perhaps a bit eccentric in our time, but consider the paradoxical truth that equality is an aristocratic ideal. It is the ideal of friendship—of those who stand apart from the collective and recognize one another as peers. As professionals, or fellow journeymen, perhaps. By contrast, the bourgeois principle is not equality but equivalence—a positing of interchangeability that elides human differences of rank.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

“Might as well” is never applied to good things. It’s never, “Might as well help all these orphans,” or “Might as well plant something healthy in this community garden.”
― Jon Acuff, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

“Because everybody is doing it.” That’s the same logic that got fifty million Nickelback albums sold. People who post twenty times a day are kidding themselves when they pretend they can do long-form thought while also being interrupted constantly to let people know they’re thinking. Social media isn’t free; it always costs you something. I’ve decided to bomb Snapchat.”
― Jon Acuff, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

“We laugh at hamsters stuck on their metal play wheels. They give everything their little hamster bodies have but don’t go anywhere. That doesn’t matter, though, because they have little hamster brains. The hamster isn’t trying to finish anything. If anything he’s just trying to execute that elusive move where you get the wheel going so fast that you can do a full 360 around the circle. I bet the girl hamsters love that. You are smarter than a hamster. There’s a positive affirmation for you. Slap that on a mug.”
― Jon Acuff, Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done

“The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over the present quickening in the general pace of things:”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The Rubicon, we know, was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay entirely in certain invisible conditions.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch