FROM Shopcraft as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work

— “The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world.”

— “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.”

— “. . . an explanation of why we are getting more stupid with every passing year — which is to say, the degradation of work is ultimately a cognitive matter, rooted in the separation of thinking from doing.”

FROM The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

— “Capitalism has gotten hip to the fact that for all our talk of an information economy, what we really have is an attentional economy, if the term “economy” applies to what is scarce and therefore valuable.”

— “As our mental lives become more fragmented, what is at stake often seems to be nothing less than the question of whether one can maintain a coherent self. I mean a self that is able to act according to settled purposes and ongoing projects, rather than flitting about.”

— “We are ideal raw material for the architects of mass behavior, and we do well to be aware of the fact so we can choose our architect.”