Best bad opening sentence: "She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida the pink ones, not the white ones except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn't wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren't." (Thanks to Alessandra Souza!)
"Among his many unique qualities, the 44th president is the first to give the impression that the job is beneath him -- that he is too big and too gifted to be confined to the humdrum interests of one nation state. As my former National Review colleague David Frum put it, the Obama address offered "the amazing spectacle of an American president taking an equidistant position between the country he leads and its detractors and enemies.""
"If boring labor is a threat to one's humanity, it stands to reason that interesting labor can be a form of redemption. The Victorian sage John Ruskin helped invent the modern cult of the craftsman: he was both an idealist and an aesthete, and he argued that miserable workers produced miserable work, and vice versa. In "The Craftsman," Sennett portrays Ruskin as a quirky and quixotic radical, sensitive to the intricate demands of great craftsmanship, and hopeful that the glories of Venetian architecture might help inspire workers to resist the ravages of "mechanical domination." Yet the call to craft is in some ways a conservative call: it asks workers to seek fulfillment through personal diligence, not politics. In "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," which was published in 1849, Ruskin proposed a novel, if unlikely, antidote to revolutionary fervor: "There is a vast quantity of idle energy among European nations at this time, which ought to go into handicrafts." He advocated not freedom from toil but freedom through toil, and he compared the demands of craftsmanship to the demands of God in the Anglican liturgy: the Master in "whose service is perfect freedom.""
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