“
Everything you possess of skill, and wealth, and handicraft,
wasn't it first merely a thought and a quest?
”
”
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
“
Art is not a handicraft; it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy
“
As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft
“
The Nobodies
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping
poverty: that one magical day good luck will suddenly rain down on
them---will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down
yesterday, today, tomorrow, or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their
left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day with their right
foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent)
“
It did not look like the work of God, but it might have represented the handicraft of a God with a joyous sense of humor, a dancing God who loved mischief as much as prayer, and playfulness as much as mischief.
”
”
Pat Conroy (South of Broad)
“
The Nobodies
Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano
“
Except for two or three older writers, all modern literature seems to me not literature but some sort of handicraft, which exists only so as to be encouraged, though one is reluctant to use its products.
”
”
Anton Chekhov (Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov)
“
The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration
”
”
Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements)
“
The U.S. imperialists supply armaments to their henchmen to massacre the Indochinese peoples. They dump their goods in Indochina to prevent the development of local handicrafts. Their pornographic culture depraves the youth in areas placed under their control. They follow the policy of buying up, deluding and dividing our people. They strive to turn some bad elements into U.S. agents that they use for the conquest of our country.
”
”
Hồ Chí Minh (Against US Aggression For National Salvation)
“
In case the term is unfamiliar, the best description ever for 'cozies' is 'murder mysteries where no one cares who got killed because they're all distracted by cooking new recipes or following intricate handicraft instructions.'"--The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap
”
”
Wendy Welch
“
Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes; and the oldest of the old men said: 'Lady, we have come to write down the names of the immortals,’ and at his words a look of great joy came into her face. Presently she, began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though she knew she had but a little while to live, and, in English, with the accent of their own country; and she told them the secret names of the immortals of many lands, and of the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and instruments of handicraft they held dearest; but most about the immortals of Ireland and of their love for the cauldron, and the whetstone, and the sword, and the spear, and the hills of the Shee, and the horns of the moon, and the Grey Wind, and the Yellow Wind, and the Black Wind, and the Red Wind. ("The Adoration of the Magi")
”
”
W.B. Yeats
“
Behind the Palace walls Mehmed indulged in an atypical pursuits of a tyrant: gardening, handicrafts and and a commissioning of the obscene frescos.
”
”
Roger Crowley (1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West)
“
Traditional American handicraft was employed in the wall’s construction, and so most of it had collapsed.
”
”
Jack Womack (Ambient)
“
Ratio became a working hypothesis, a heuristic principle, and thus led to the incomparable rise of technology. This was something fundamentally new in world history. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Greek temples, from the medieval cathedrals up to the eighteenth century, technology was a matter of handicraft. It served religion, royalty, culture, and people’s daily needs.
”
”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Ethics (Works, Vol 6))
“
Coleridge, who when at Christ's Hospital was ambitious to be a shoemaker's apprentice, was right when he declared that shoemakers had given to the world a larger number of eminent men than any other handicraft.
”
”
George Smith (The Life of William Carey)
“
may occasionally pay lip-service to their value, but it ultimately has no real use for artists, dancers, poets, self-sufficient farmers, tree lovers, devoted followers of what it views as non-materialist cults — Christian or otherwise — handicraft workers, makers of their own beer, or, for that matter, stay-at-home moms and dads, all of whom, when they endure at all, do so at the margins and on the periphery of the social economy.
”
”
John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
“
The German economic historian Fanz Oertel in the 1950s points to another drastic consequence of a slave economy. A slave economy initially allowed an increase of productivity through the invention and use of new machinery. Roman products remained at a simple level and could be reproduced by handicraft. By the fourth century, for example, the robust pottery industry of Greece was in sharp decline because other parts of the empire also learned to make pottery.
"The decline in international trade in the Mediterranean in the fourth century was partly due to increasing piracy, but it was also due to lack of industrial innovation and of need for exchange of manufactured goods.
”
”
Norman F. Cantor (Antiquity: The Civilization of the Ancient World)
“
In a society of increasingly mass-produced, assembly-line entertainment, where every individual is treated like an empty pitcher to be filled from above, jazz retains something of the spirit of the handicrafts of yesteryear. The print of the human spirit warms it. Deep down, jazz expresses the enforced & compassionate attitudes of a minority group and may well appeal to us because we all have blue moods and, in a fundamental sense, none of us is wholly free.
”
”
Marshall W. Stearns (The Story of Jazz (Galaxy Books))
“
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog,
and nobodies dream of escaping poverty:
that one magical day good luck will
suddenly rain on them-will rain
down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t
rain down yesterday, today, tomorrow,
or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a
fine drizzle, no matter how hard the
nobodies summon it, even if their left
hand is tickling, or if they begin the new
day with their right foot, or start the
new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children,
owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no
ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits,
dying trough life, screwed every which
way.
Who are not, but could be. Who don’t
speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t
have religions, but superstitions. Who
don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who
don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are
not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms. Who
do not have names, but numbers. Who
do not appear in the history of the
world, but in the police blotter of the
local paper. The nobodies, who are not
worth the bullet that kills them.
”
”
Eduardo Galeano (The Book of Embraces)
“
Poverty when coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration. This is true of the poor artisan skilled in his trade and of the poor writer, artist and scientist in the full possession of creative powers. Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out. The decline of handicrafts in modern times is perhaps one of the causes for the rise of frustration and the increased susceptibility of the individual to mass movements. It
”
”
Eric Hoffer (The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements)
“
In an advanced industrial society it becomes almost impossible to seek, even to imagine, unemployment as a condition for autonomous, useful work. The infrastructure of society is arranged so that only the job gives access to the tools of production...Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.
”
”
Ivan Illich
“
Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone.
”
”
Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown)
“
To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft.
”
”
George Eliot (Silas Marner (Illustrated))
“
Housework, handicrafts, subsistence agriculture, radical technology, learning exchanges, and the like are degraded into activities for the idle, the unproductive, the very poor, or the very rich. A society that fosters intense dependence on commodities thus turns its unemployed into either its poor or its dependents.
”
”
Ivan Illich
“
Although per capita income doubled during the half-century, not all sectors of society shared equally in this abundance. While both rich and poor enjoyed rising incomes, their inequality of wealth widened significantly. As the population began to move from farm to city, farmers increasingly specialized in the production of crops for the market rather than for home consumption. The manufacture of cloth, clothing, leather goods, tools, and other products shifted from home to shop and from shop to factory. In the process many women experienced a change in roles from producers to consumers with a consequent transition in status. Some craftsmen suffered debasement of their skills as the division of labor and power-driven machinery eroded the traditional handicraft methods of production and transformed them from self-employed artisans to wage laborers. The resulting potential for class conflict threatened the social fabric of this brave new republic.
”
”
James M. McPherson (Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era)
“
Now I believe that the increasing mechanization and ‘stupidization’ of most manufacturing processes involve the serious danger of a general degeneration of our organ of intelligence. The more the chances in life of the clever and of the unresponsive worker are equalled out by the repression of handicraft and the spreading of tedious and boring work on the assembly line, the more will a good brain, clever hands and a sharp eye become superfluous. Indeed the unintelligent man, who naturally finds it easier to submit to the boring toil, will be favoured; he is likely to find it easier to thrive, to settle down and to beget offspring. The result may easily amount even to a negative selection as regards talents and gifts.
”
”
Erwin Schrödinger (What is Life? (Canto Classics))
“
Mary was proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more _gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do.
”
”
George MacDonald (Mary Marston)
“
Like many who make their livelihood with their minds, she had an outsized pride in the few things her hands had crafted. It was perhaps the only things for which Ironfist could consider her a silly old lady.
”
”
Brent Weeks (The Blinding Knife (Lightbringer, #2))
“
Let us not underestimate the privileges of the mediocre. Life is always harder as one mounts the heights—the cold increases, responsibility increases. A high civilization is a pyramid: it can stand only on a broad base; its primary prerequisite is a strong and soundly consolidated mediocrity. The handicrafts, commerce, agriculture, science, the greater part of art, in brief, the whole range of occupational activities, are compatible only with mediocre ability and aspiration; such callings would be out of place for exceptional men; the instincts which belong to them stand as much opposed to aristocracy as to anarchism. The fact that a man is publicly useful, that he is a wheel, a function, is evidence of a natural predisposition; it is not society, but the only sort of happiness that the majority are capable of, that makes them intelligent machines. To the mediocre mediocrity is a form of happiness; they have a natural instinct for mastering one thing, for specialization. It would be altogether unworthy of a profound intellect to see anything objectionable in mediocrity in itself. It is, in fact, the first prerequisite to the appearance of the exceptional: it is a necessary condition to a high degree of civilization. When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty.... Whom do I hate most heartily among the rabbles of today? The rabble of Socialists, the apostles to the Chandala, who undermine the workingman’s instincts, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his petty existence—who make him envious and teach him revenge.... Wrong never lies in unequal rights; it lies in the assertion of “equal” rights.... What is bad? But I have already answered: all that proceeds from weakness, from envy, from revenge.—The anarchist and the Christian have the same ancestry....
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“
Westerners came in with guns, they made the native governments sign agreements not to raise their import tariff over 5 percent and in one case 8 percent. Japan didn’t get free from that tariff until the 20th century. In China and in the Ottoman Empire they didn’t get rid of it until well in the 20th century. And this 5 percent tariff made it impossible for them to keep European industrial goods out and preserve the handicraft of their own peasantry. Well, now, the transportation and communication revolution requires capital. Where are they going to get it? There is no development ahead of it which would provide it. It requires labor. Where are they going to get that? Their economic system, their agricultural system, is already producing hardly enough. Well, the way they got these skilled technologists, where they got these inventions, where they got the capital was, of course, from Europe, generally by borrowing it and building railroads and so forth. But they were not paying for it themselves.
”
”
Carroll Quigley (Carroll Quigley: Life, Lectures and Collected Writings)
“
The stories I have discussed, which might be taken to be about reading and memory, are in fact explorations of the relationship between memory and forgetfulness. A relationship expressed through objects, volumes that are containers, the result of a kind of handicraft we call books that we read as remnants, as ruins of the texture of the past, of their ideas that survive. Because it is the fate of what is whole to be reduced to parts, to fragments, chaotic lists and examples that are still legible." - Jorge Carrión, Bookshops: A Reader's History
”
”
Jorge Carrión (Bookshops: A Reader's History)
“
Everything I value about him seems to be physical: the rest is either unknown, disagreeable or ridiculous. I don’t care much for his temperament, which alternates between surliness and gloom, or for the overgrown pots he throws so skillfully on the wheel and then mutilates, cutting holes in them, strangling them, slashing them open. That’s unfair, he never uses a knife, only his fingers, and a lot of the time he only bends them, doubles them over; even so they have a disagreeable mutant quality. Nobody else admires them either: the aspiring housewives he teaches two evenings a week, Pottery and Ceramics 432-A, want to make ashtrays and plates with cheerful daisies on them instead, and the things don’t sell at all in the few handicraft shops that will even stock them. So they accumulate in our already cluttered basement apartment like fragmentary memories or murder victims. I can’t even put flowers in them, the water would run out through the rips. Their only function is to uphold Joe’s unvoiced claim to superior artistic seriousness: every time I sell a poster design or get a new commission he mangles another pot.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)
“
The calamity leaves us our old courage and our old earnest energy. Let the world say venomously what it cannot refrain from saying; it will leave you and me cold. On the contrary, we are counting on the possibility of a hard life which will have a purpose other than earning as much money as possible. Our purpose is in the first place self-reform by means of a handicraft and of intercourse with nature, believing as we do that this is our first duty in order to be honest with others and to be consistent - our aim is walking with God - the opposite of living in the midst of the doings of the big cities.
”
”
Vincent van Gogh
“
The dignity and energy of the Roman character, conspicuous in war and in politics, were not easily tamed and adjusted to the arts of industry and literature. The degenerate and pliant Greeks, on the contrary, excelled in the handicraft and polite professions. We learn from the vigorous invective of Juvenal that they were the most useful and capable of servants, whether as pimps or professors of rhetoric. Obsequious, dextrous and ready, the versatile Greeks monopolized the business of teaching, publishing and manufacturing in the Roman Empire, allowing their masters ample leisure for the service of the State, in the Senate or on the field.
”
”
The Richmond Enquirer 1850s
“
But there was also about him an indescribable air which no mechanic could have acquired in the practice of his handicraft however dishonestly exercised: the air common to men who live on the vices, the follies, or the baser fears of mankind; the air of moral nihilism common to keepers of gambling hells and disorderly houses; to private detectives and inquiry agents; to drink sellers and, I should say, to the sellers of invigorating electric belts and to the inventors of patent medicines. But of that last I am not sure, not having carried my investigations so far into the depths. For all I know, the expression of these last may be perfectly diabolic. I shouldn’t be surprised. What I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc’s expression was by no means diabolic.
”
”
Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale)
“
Great Discourse on Blessings AT one time the Exalted One was living in Jeta Grove. A certain deity of astounding beauty approached the Exalted One and said: Many deities and humans have pondered on blessings. Tell me the blessings supreme. The Buddha replied: To associate not with the foolish, to be with the wise, to honor the worthy ones this is a blessing supreme. To reside in a suitable location, to have good past deeds done, to set oneself in the right direction this is a blessing supreme. To be well spoken, highly trained, well educated, skilled in handicraft, and highly disciplined, this is a blessing supreme. To be well caring of mother, of father, to look after spouse and children, to engage in a harmless occupation, this is a blessing supreme. Outstanding behavior, blameless action, open hands to all relatives and selfless giving, this is a blessing supreme. To cease and abstain from evil, to avoid intoxicants, to be diligent in virtuous practices, this is a blessing supreme. To be reverent and humble, content and grateful, to hear the Dharma at the right time, this is a blessing supreme. To be patient and obedient, to visit with spiritual people, to discuss the Dharma at the right time, this is a blessing supreme. To live austerely and purely, to see the noble truths, and to realize nirvana, this is the blessing supreme. A mind unshaken when touched by the worldly states, sorrowless, stainless, and secure, this is the blessing supreme. Those who have fulfilled all these are everywhere invincible; they find well-being everywhere, theirs is the blessing supreme. adapted from MANGALA SUTTA, translated by Gunaratana Mahathera
”
”
Jack Kornfield (Teachings of the Buddha)
“
There was no reason whatever to make a wholesale choice between handicraft and machine production: between a single contemporary part of the technological pool and all the other past accumulations. But there was a genuine reason to maintain as many diverse units in this pool as possible, in order to increase the range of both human choices and technological inventiveness. Many of the machines of the nineteenth century, as Kropotkin pointed out, were admirable auxiliaries to handicraft processes, once they could be scaled, like the efficient small electric motor, to the small workshop and the personally controlled operation. William Morris and his colleagues, who almost single-handed salvaged and restored one ancient craft after another, by personally mastering the arts of dyeing, weaving, embroidering, printing, glass-painting, paper-making, book-binding, showed superior technological insight to those who scoffed at their romanticism.
”
”
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
“
But as soon as you enter a university, we witness a radical and communal face of Communism. Here, they propagate the weaknesses and evils of Hindu culture. They manipulate and twist ancient books to misrepresent them and provoke students. For example, they use Tulsidas’ chaupai, without mentioning the rest of the Ramcharitmanas, which is the real context. “ढोल गंवार शूद्र पशु नारी, सकल ताडना के अधिकारी.” Dhol ganvar shudra pashu nari, sakal tadana ke adhikari. ‘The above lines are spoken by the Sea Deity Samudra to Ram. When Lord Ram got angry and took out his weapon in order to evaporate the whole sea, the deity appeared and said the above lines in the context of boundaries that are created by God himself in order to hold his creations. ‘What Leftists do is that they very cleverly translate it literally in Hindi, ignoring the fact that Ramcharitmanas is written in Awadhi and the same word means one thing in Hindi and another in Awadhi. While the literal meaning of the line in Hindi is ‘Drums, the illiterate, lower caste, animals and women deserve a beating to straighten up and get the acts together’, its real meaning in Awadhi is different. In Awadhi, tadna means to take care, to protect. Whereas, in Hindi, the same word means punishment, torture, oppression. Samudra meant that like drums, the illiterate, Shudra, animals and women need special care and need to be protected in the boundary of a social safety net. In the same way, the sea also needs to reside within the boundaries created by God. And hence, Samudra gave the suggestion to create the iconic Ram Setu. ‘Here, Shudra doesn’t mean lower caste or today’s Dalit. It meant people employed in cottage industries.’ I remember there is a book by R.C. Dutta, Economic Interpretation of History, in which he has said that when the Indian economy was based on the principles of Varna, handicrafts accounted for over twenty-five percent of the economy. Artisans and labour who were involved in the handicraft business were called ‘Shudra’. If there was so much caste-based discrimination, why would Brahmins use their produce? Both Dutta and Dadabhai Naoroji have written that the terminology of ‘caste discrimination’ was used by the British to divide Indian society on those lines.
”
”
Vivek Agnihotri (Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam)
“
It may be cheap, but it should also be sturdy. What must be avoided at all costs is dishonest, distorted and ornate work. What must be sought is the natural, direct, simple, sturdy and safe.
Confining beauty to visual appreciation and excluding the beauty of practical objects has proven to be a grave error on the part of modern man. A true appreciation of beauty cannot be fostered by ignoring practical handicrafts. After all, there is no greater opportunity for appreciating beauty than through its use in our daily lives, no greater opportunity for coming into direct contact with the beautiful. It was the tea masters who first recognized this fact. Their profound aesthetic insight came as a result of their experience with utilitarian objects.
If life and beauty are treated as belonging to different realms, our aesthetic sensibilities will gradually wither and decline.
It is said that someone living in proximity to a flowering garden grows insensitive to its fragrance. Likewise, when one becomes too familiar with a sight, one loses the ability to truly see it. Habit robs us of the power to perceive anew, much less the power to be moved. Thus it has taken us all these years, all these ages, to detect the beauty in common objects.
The world of utility and the world of beauty are not separate realms.
Users and the used have exchanged a vow: the more an object is used the more beautiful it will become and the more the user uses an object, the more the object will be used.
When machines are in control, the beauty they produce is cold and shallow. It is the human hand that creates subtlety and warmth.
Weakness cannot withstand the rigors of daily use.
The true meaning of the tea ceremony is being forgotten. The beauty of the way of tea should be the beauty of the ordinary, the beauty of honest poverty.
Equating the expensive with the beautiful cannot be a point of pride.
Under the snow's reflected light creeping into the houses, beneath the dim lamplight, various types of manual work are taken up. This is how time is forgotten; this is how work absorbs the hours and days. yet there is work to do, work to be done with the hands. Once this work begins, the clock no longer measures the passage of time.
The history of kogin is the history of utility being transformed into beauty.
Through their own efforts, these people made their daily lives more beautiful. This is the true calling, the mission, of handicrafts. We are drawn by that beauty and we have much to learn from it.
As rich as it is, America is perhaps unrivalled for its vulgar lack of propriety and decorum, which may account for its having the world's highest crime rate.
The art of empty space seen in the Nanga school of monochrome painting and the abstract, free-flowing art of calligraphy have already begun to exert considerable influence on the West.
Asian art represents a latent treasure trove of immense and wide-reaching value for the future and that is precisely because it presents a sharp contrast to Western art.
No other country has pursued the art of imperfection as eagerly as Japan.
Just as Western art and architecture owe much to the sponsorship of the House of Medici during the Reformation, tea and Noh owe much to the protection of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa ( 1436-1490 ).
The most brilliant era of Japanese culture, the Higashiyama period ( 1443-1490 ).
Literally, sabi commonly means "loneliness" but as a Buddhist term it originally referred to the cessation of attachment.
The beauty of tea is the beauty of sabi. It might also be called the beauty of poverty or in our day it might be simply be called the beauty of simplicity. The tea masters familiar with this beauty were called sukisha-ki meaning "lacking". The sukisha were masters of enjoying what was lacking.
”
”
Soetsu Yanagi (The Beauty of Everyday Things)
“
The instatement of the One Religion was surely the Magnates’ most cunning move: a device through which they were able to access and harness the incalculable power of the people’s spiritual fervor… Elijah could imagine the Magnates taking cold pleasure in their handicraft.
Where chaos ruled, people both high and low were easy to manipulate.
”
”
J. Valor (Salomé)
“
In our family, we live by the Hard Thing Rule. It has three parts. The first is that everyone—including Mom and Dad—has to do a hard thing. A hard thing is something that requires daily deliberate practice. I’ve told my kids that psychological research is my hard thing, but I also practice yoga. Dad tries to get better and better at being a real estate developer; he does the same with running. My oldest daughter, Amanda, has chosen playing the piano as her hard thing. She did ballet for years, but later quit. So did Lucy. This brings me to the second part of the Hard Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In other words, you can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, or you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day. And, finally, the Hard Thing Rule states that you get to pick your hard thing. Nobody picks it for you because, after all, it would make no sense to do a hard thing you’re not even vaguely interested in. Even the decision to try ballet came after a discussion of various other classes my daughters could have chosen instead. Lucy, in fact, cycled through a half-dozen hard things. She started each with enthusiasm but eventually discovered that she didn’t want to keep going with ballet, gymnastics, track, handicrafts, or piano. In the end, she landed on viola. She’s been at it for three years, during which time her interest has waxed rather than waned. Last year, she joined the school and all-city orchestras, and when I asked her recently if she wanted to switch her hard thing to something else, she looked at me like I was crazy. Next year, Amanda will be in high school. Her sister will follow the year after. At that point, the Hard Thing Rule will change. A fourth requirement will be added: each girl must commit to at least one activity, either something new or the piano and viola they’ve already started, for at least two years. Tyrannical? I don’t believe it is. And if Lucy’s and Amanda’s recent comments on the topic aren’t disguised apple-polishing, neither do my daughters. They’d like to grow grittier as they get older, and, like any skill, they know grit takes practice. They know they’re fortunate to have the opportunity to do so. For parents who would like to encourage grit without obliterating their children’s capacity to choose their own path, I recommend the Hard Thing Rule.
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Angela Duckworth (Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance)
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Hesse the autodidact, who had acquired all his learning from books that he had chosen himself (in this, he was in good company with other important authors, such as Thomas Mann), knew that anyone who motivates themselves to read, reads differently than someone who is simply working their way through a program of compulsory reading. The self-starting readers seeks answers for his life in all the books he reads, and he expects every new volume he embarks on to open up fresh horizons. Books to him are the food of life, one might even say an essential means of survival. Yet alongside this function they also have an intrinsic value as beautiful objects with which he likes to surround himself. He recommends certain books, at the very least identifying favorite books that he will read over and over, and will have rebound several times - or, should he possess an aptitude for handicraft (as Hesse did), rebinding them himself. In this way, the book collector becomes a co-creator.
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Hermann Hesse
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The basic reason why poor countries are poor is that they lack the technological capital that rich countries have, which makes output per worker dramatically higher. To get rich, poor countries must therefore undertake a process of “technological catch-up,” in which they acquire technology from rich countries and use it to accelerate the productivity of their own workforce. Exports help this catch-up process in two ways. When a country is poor, foreign technology is expensive and must be paid for in scarce hard currency. Exports (initially of agricultural products, handicrafts, and cheap manufactures) can earn the foreign exchange needed to buy the capital equipment that enables higher-value production.
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Arthur R. Kroeber (China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know)
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The programmer seemed to be a throwback to an earlier age of handicrafts, when each maker put a distinctive stamp on what were functionally the same products. Well rewarded, the programmer’s work was judged harshly.
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G. Pascal Zachary (Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft)
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Thimphu not only has the best handicraft shops in the country (it does), it's also the best place to actually see the products being made, from
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Lonely Planet (Lonely Planet Bhutan (Travel Guide))
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To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time. Depending on the kind of essentials, depending on the realm from which they address us, the answer and with it the kind of learning differs. A cabinetmaker's apprentice, someone who is learning to build cabinets and the like, will serve as an example. His learning is not mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools. Nor does he merely gather knowledge about the customary forms of the things he is to build. If he is to become a true cabinetmaker, he makes himself answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood--to wood as it enters into man's dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature. In fact, this relatedness to wood is what maintains the whole craft. Without that relatedness, the craft will never be anything but empty busywork, any occupation with it will be determined exclusively by business concerns. Every handicraft, all human dealings are constantly in that danger. The writing of poetry is no more exempt from it than is thinking.
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Martin Heidegger (What is Called Thinking?)
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Kukapa sitä ei muovihärpäkkeen sijaan tekisi mieluummin ornamentoidulla sarvikävyllä.
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Niillas Holmberg (Halla Helle)
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Reconstructing family life amid the chaos of the cotton revolution was no easy matter. Under the best of circumstances, the slave family on the frontier was extraordinarily unstable because the frontier plantation was extraordinarily unstable. For every aspiring master who climbed into the planter class, dozens failed because of undercapitalization, unproductive land, insect infestation, bad weather, or sheer incompetence. Others, discouraged by low prices and disdainful of the primitive conditions, simply gave up and returned home. Those who succeeded often did so only after they had failed numerous times. Each failure or near-failure caused slaves to be sold, shattering families and scattering husbands and wives, parents and children. Success, moreover, was no guarantee of security for slaves. Disease and violence struck down some of the most successful planters. Not even longevity assured stability, as many successful planters looked west for still greater challenges. Whatever the source, the chronic volatility of the plantation took its toll on the domestic life of slaves.
Despite these difficulties, the family became the center of slave life in the interior, as it was on the seaboard. From the slaves' perspective, the most important role they played was not that of field hand or mechanic but husband or wife, son or daughter - the precise opposite of their owners' calculation. As in Virginia and the Carolinas, the family became the locus of socialization, education, governance, and vocational training. Slave families guided courting patterns, marriage rituals, child-rearing practices, and the division of domestic labor in Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond. Sally Anne Chambers, who grew up in Louisiana, recalled how slaves turned to the business of family on Saturdays and Sundays. 'De women do dey own washing den. De menfolks tend to de gardens round dey own house. Dey raise some cotton and sell it to massa and git li'l money dat way.'
As Sally Anne Chambers's memories reveal, the reconstructed slave family was more than a source of affection. It was a demanding institution that defined responsibilities and enforced obligations, even as it provided a source of succor. Parents taught their children that a careless word in the presence of the master or mistress could spell disaster. Children and the elderly, not yet or no longer laboring in the masters' fields, often worked in the slaves' gardens and grounds, as did new arrivals who might be placed in the household of an established family. Charles Ball, sold south from Maryland, was accepted into his new family but only when he agreed to contribute all of his overwork 'earnings into the family stock.'
The 'family stock' reveals how the slaves' economy undergirded the slave family in the southern interior, just as it had on the seaboard. As slaves gained access to gardens and grounds, overwork, or the sale of handicraft, they began trading independently and accumulating property. The material linkages of sellers and buyers - the bartering of goods and labor among themselves - began to knit slaves together into working groups that were often based on familial connections. Before long, systems of ownership and inheritance emerged, joining men and women together on a foundation of need as well as affection.
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Ira Berlin (Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves)
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The pattern imposed by the centralized megamachine was transmitted eventually to local trades and crafts, in life-constricting servile work; for there is no human virtue left in handicraft when, as in the making of a spur, for example, seven specialists were employed to perform the seven specialized operations to make this simple tool. The sense that all work was degrading to the human spirit spread insensibly from the megamachine to every other manual occupation.
Why this 'civilized' technical complex should have been regarded as an unqualified triumph, and why the human race has endured it so long, will always be one of the puzzles of history.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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But what shall we say of the counter-Luddites, the systematic craft-wreckers, of the machine: the ruthless enterprisers who, during the last two centuries, have in effect confiscated the tools, destroyed the independent workshops, and wiped out the living traditions of handicraft culture? What they have done is to debase a versatile and still viable polytechnics to a monotechnics, and at the same time they have sacrificed human autonomy and variety to a system of centralized control that becomes increasingly more automatic and compulsive. If, two centuries earlier, they had fully succeeded in extirpating the handicraft traditions of the primitive peoples, rubber would not play the part it now does in our advanced technology. Were these craft-wreckers afraid to let handiwork survive lest it join forces, against their financial interests, with the human heart?
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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That there have been considerable gains in many old areas is beyond doubt; and that there has been a creative enrichment through many new technological processes and products is equally evident. But the nineteenth-century exponents of 'progress,' and their old-fashioned disciples today, falsified the picture by failing to take account of the accompanying losses-above all, losses brought about through the deliberate extirpation of the handicraft tradition itself, with its immense storage of human experience and skill, only a small part of which has been passed on in the design and fabrication of machines. On this score, Leibnitz's observation still holds: "Concerning unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings, I am convinced that it surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth is not yet recorded." Most of that unrecorded wealth, deplorably, is now lost forever.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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As a Persian scholar wrote, around 1115, “The people of China are the most skilfull of men in handicrafts. No other nation approaches them in this. The people of Rum (the Eastern Roman Empire) are highly proficient (in technology) too, but they do not reach the standards of the Chinese. The latter say that all men are blind in craftsmanship, except the men of Rum, who however are one-eyed, that is, they know only half the business.
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Tonio Andrade (The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History)
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For thousands of years before men had any accurate and exact knowledge of the changes of material things, they had thought about these changes, regarded them as revelations of spiritual truths, built on them theories of things in heaven and earth (and a good many things in neither), and used them in manufactures, arts, and handicrafts, especially in one very curious manufacture wherein not the thousandth fragment of a grain of the finished article was ever produced.
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Matthew Moncrieff Pattison Muir (The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry)
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But if tools were actually central to mental growth beyond purely animal needs, how is it that those primitive peoples, like the Australian Bushmen, who have the most rudimentary technology, nevertheless exhibit elaborate religious ceremonials, an extremely complicated kinship organization, and a complex and differentiated language? Why, further, were highly developed cultures, like those of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Peruvians, still using only the simplest handicraft equipment, though they were capable of constructing superbly planned works of engineering and architecture, like the road to Machu Pichu and Machu Pichu itself? And how is it that the Maya, who had neither machines nor draught animals, were not only great artists but masters of abstruse mathematical calculations.
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Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
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The Indian must not lose pride in what he does, in his handicraft, for if he loses pride he will no longer build, his art will fail him, and he will completely be dependent upon others.
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Louis L'Amour
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Learn all the handicrafts’, said the Mahatma, ‘that’s the way to peaceful independence. If you use rifles and guns and tanks, it is a foolish thing.
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Ramachandra Guha (India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy)
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Removal Act of 1830. The residents found the Native Americans at Qualla quaint and amusing, and some would purchase Cherokee handicrafts to take home. The Removal Act of 1830, as vile a piece of legislation as ever enacted by a democratic government, decreed that all native peoples residing east of the Mississippi were to be relocated in Oklahoma. Ten thousand years of Native American culture meant nothing; a stroke of President Andrew Jackson’s pen set more than 100,000 Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Choctaw natives on a forced march west, a trek that has become known as the Trail of Tears. Many died on the way; others chose to die in protest against becoming strangers in a land bequeathed to them by their ancestors. But a handful of Cherokee successfully avoided the government round-up. They hid in the hills of south-east Tennessee, hills through which no white settler dare pass, and when a more enlightened federal government established the Qualla Reservation in 1889, their descendants were rewarded with the return of lands which had been their birthright from the beginning.
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John Lawrence Reynolds (MAD NOTIONS)
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In the ancient world the intuitive awareness of break boundaries as points of reversal and of no return was embodied in the Greek idea of hubris, which Toynbee presents in his Study of History, under the head of “The Nemesis of Creativity” and “The Reversal of Roles.” The Greek dramatists presented the idea of creativity as creating, also, its own kind of blindness, as in the case of Oedipus Rex, who solved the riddle of the Sphinx. It was as if the Greeks felt that the penalty for one break-through was a general sealing-off of awareness to the total field. In a Chinese work—The Way and Its Power (A. Waley translation)—there is a series of instances of the overheated medium, the overextended man or culture, and the peripety or reversal that inevitably follows: He who stands on tiptoe does not stand firm;
He who takes the longest strides does not walk the fastest …
He who boasts of what he will do succeeds in nothing;
He who is proud of his work achieves nothing that endures. One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies). Today with microfilm and micro-cards, not to mention electric memories, the printed word assumes again much of the handicraft character of a manuscript. But printing from movable type was, itself, the major break boundary in the history of phonetic literacy, just as the phonetic alphabet had been the break boundary between tribal and individualist man.
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Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man)
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mandap exporters
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As well as protection, Athena brings further gifts to the work of healing from trauma. Past trauma can be transformed through ‘physical experiences that directly contradict the helplessness, rage and collapse that are part of trauma’ and which foster a renewed sense of self-mastery. Because trauma tends to be experienced in ‘isolated fragments,’ treatment particularly needs to engage the entire organism, ‘body, mind, and brain.’ Athena’s domain includes reading and writing, weaving and handicraft: creative skills which help the survivor engage fully in activities which strengthen new neural pathways for pleasure and joy.
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Laura Shannon (Re-visioning Medusa: from Monster to Divine Wisdom)
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This is kinda cool,” Mike said. “There’s a satisfying sort of rhythm to it once you get the hang of it.” “That’s why people enjoy it,” I said. “It’s very relaxing. Almost meditative. And then of course there’s the sense of accomplishment from making something with your hands.” “I could see that.” “I’ve always thought it was sad that boys in this country aren’t encouraged to do handicrafts more, because they can be very therapeutic. But we’ve developed this ridiculous idea that the hearth arts are feminizing and anything feminine is inherently weak, which prevents men from pursuing them.” “Like how the girls all took home ec and the boys took shop class,” Mike said. “Exactly,” I said. “Although they’ve done away with home ec and shop at most schools these days. But you still see it in scouting. Boy Scouts learn wilderness survival skills, while in Girl Scouts it’s often more about cooking and sewing and selling cookies.” Mike frowned at his yarn. “It never even occurred to me when I was a kid to ask my mom to teach me how to knit. I remember she taught my sister, or she tried to, anyway. I learned how to change the oil in my dad’s car instead, which isn’t nearly as much fun.” “It’s arguably a bit more useful I suppose.
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Susannah Nix (Mad About Ewe (Common Threads, #1))
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The worker in handicrafts will ask himself if there are not ways by which the sense of beauty could be extended from the somewhat narrow fields of art to the broader field of human relations. And he comes to see that to ask the question is in part to answer it.
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Glenn Adamson (Craft: An American History)
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We are capable of otium, of the unconditional conviction that although a handicraft does not shame one in any sense, it certainly reduces one's rank. However much we may respect "industry," and know how to give it its due, we do not appreciate it in a bourgeois sense, or after the manner of those insatiable and cackling artists who, like hens, cackle and lay eggs, and cackle again.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
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As Hephaistia she was associated with Hephaistos, and as Areia with the war-god Ares. As Ergane, goddess of handicrafts, she came close to the former of these gods, and as Alalkomene, “the Parrier”, she came close to the latter. Of all the handicrafts she most loved and protected the art of smiths and metal-founders, likewise the women’s crafts—spinning and weaving and woolwork.
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Karl Kerényi (The Gods of The Greeks)
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I was bored at school, where the intention was to make a young lady out of me. We had lessons in dressmaking, cooking, typing, handicrafts, and handwriting. I was known as “the Polack,” and accepted it. I didn’t try to make any friends, because I knew that in the end we would be leaving this island where we had nothing of value to lose. At school there was constant talk of the war, and that was what truly frightened me. Whenever we got mail, I hoped to receive a letter from Papa, but all that came were postcards
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Armando Lucas Correa (The German Girl)
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The Bauhaus fights against the cheap substitute, inferior workmanship, and the dilettantism of the handicrafts, for a new standard of quality work.
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Nicholas Fox Weber (Ibauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design)
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The monastic brotherhood was long gone, replaced by man-children fueled by what Lewis called the “eerie popular feeling that no job was worth taking outside investment banking.” John Gutfreund himself led the way; at a dinner party that year he reportedly looked his table partner in the eye and said, “Well, you’ve got the name, but you don’t have the money.” It was a question as to how long he’d have his own: a slipping bond market forced Salomon to fend off a hostile takeover by Ron Perelman. Everyone was a speculator: in 1987, $1 billion were spent on baseball cards; $350 million were spent on tickets to actual baseball games. Everyone was a gambler: State lotteries spread, Las Vegas and Atlantic City became family destinations, and Indian gaming would soon be legal. Easy credit was now a way of life—the pleasures of the ’80s had been charged to credit cards; $375 billion worth in 1987 alone—Robert Heilbroner predicted “a vast crisis” if the US continued to send industrial jobs to Mexico while it concentrated on “handicrafts.
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Thomas Dyja (New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (Must-Read American History))
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They’re strange here,” Arren said. “It’s that way with everything; they don’t know the difference. Like what one of them said to the headman last night, ‘You wouldn’t know the true azure from blue mud. . . .’ They complain about bad times, but they don’t know when the bad times began; they say the work’s shoddy, but they don’t improve it; they don’t even know the difference between an artisan and a spell-worker, between handicraft and the Art Magic. It’s as if they had no lines and distinctions and colors clear in their heads. Everything’s the same to them; everything’s grey.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Farthest Shore (Earthsea Cycle, #3))
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The Delhi Sultans and the Mughals may have arrived from abroad, and their progenitors might initially have harked back to distant cities in the Ferghana Valley as their idea of ‘home’, but they settled in India and retained no extraterritorial allegiance. They married women from India and diluted their foreign blood to the point that in a few generations no trace remained of their foreign ethnicity. Akbar’s son Jehangir was half-Rajput; Jehangir’s son Shah Jehan also came from an Indian bride; Aurangzeb was only one-eighth non-Indian. Of course, the Mughal emperors were all deeply aware of their connections to Ferghana; they would ask emissaries from there about the conditions of their ancestors’ Chingisid tombs and donate money for their upkeep. The past was part of the Mughal identity, but their conceptions of themselves in the present and for the future became more rooted and embedded in India. The British, in contrast, maintained racial exclusivity, practised discrimination against Indians and sneered at miscegenation. Yes, the Mughal emperors taxed the citizens of India, they claimed tributes from subordinate princes, they plundered the treasuries of those they defeated in battle—all like the British—but they spent or saved what they had earned in India, instead of ‘repatriating’ it to Samarkand or Bukhara as the British did by sending their Indian revenues to London. They ploughed the resources of India into the development of India, establishing and patronizing its industries and handicrafts; they brought painters, sculptors and architects from foreign lands, but they absorbed them at their courts and encouraged them to adorn the artistic and cultural heritage of their new land. The British did little, very little, of such things. They basked in the Indian sun and yearned for their cold and fog-ridden homeland; they sent the money they had taken off the perspiring brow of the Indian worker to England; and whatever little they did for India, they ensured India paid for it in excess. And at the end of it all, they went home to enjoy their retirements in damp little cottages with Indian names, their alien rest cushioned by generous pensions provided by Indian taxpayers.
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Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
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That a smith condemned for life to make the heads of nails would lose all interest in his work, that he would be entirely at the mercy of his employer with his limited handicraft, that he would be out of work four months out of twelve, and that his wages would fall very low down, when it would be easy to replace him by an apprentice, Smith did not think of all this when he exclaimed - 'Long live the division of labour. This is the real gold-mine that will enrich the nation!' And all joined him in this cry.
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Pyotr Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread (Working Classics))
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Paternalism often must transform its subjects into children or people with childlike qualities. This is the most salient aspect of paternalism as it concerns disability. Paternalism is experienced as the bystander grabs the arm of a blind person and, without asking, “helps” the person across the street. This happens for wheelchair users as well. It is the experience of the waiter asking a companion of a person with a disability, “What does she want to eat?” It is the institutionalization of people against their wishes. It is the child taught only handicrafts, or the charity pleading for money to help cute crippled kids. It is these and a thousand other examples of everyday life. It is most of all, however, the assumption that people with disabilities are intrinsically inferior and unable to take responsibility for their own lives.
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James I. Charlton (Nothing About Us Without Us: Disability Oppression and Empowerment)
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Germany under Hitler was still only a partially modernized society, in which upwards of 15 million people depended for their living either on traditional handicrafts or on peasant agriculture.
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Anonymous
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To accomplish the vast work of bringing all living beings happiness, especially the peerless happiness of full enlightenment, we need to become enlightened. To guide others perfectly, we need to develop the inner qualities of our mind, especially omniscient wisdom, compassion for all beings, and the perfect power to reveal the methods to help others. These qualities are vital in healing ourselves and all other living beings. Enlightenment means cessation of ignorance, anger, attachment, and all other unhealthy thoughts, as well as cessation of even their subtle imprints, and completion of all realizations. And enlightenment is achieved through mental development. We need to develop both compassion and wisdom. We need to develop not only the wisdom that understands conventional reality, especially the causes of happiness and suffering, but also the wisdom that understands ultimate reality, because it is only then that we can eliminate the ignorance that is the root of all suffering and its causes and achieve liberation.
Normally, before we can teach others about literature, philosophy, science, or handicrafts we ourselves need to be qualified to teach. For example, before doctors can train other people to become doctors, they must have the knowledge and clinical skills needed to diagnose even obscure diseases. In a similar way, we cannot lead all living beings to the state of full enlightenment unless we are perfectly qualified through development of the positive qualities of mind, especially compassion and wisdom. Only then can we really help others. The purpose of our life is to heal every single living being's body and mind of all suffering and its causes and to bring every one of them to the ultimate, everlasting happiness of full enlightenment. Developing our inner qualities of wisdom and compassion is the way to heal our own mind and body, and through this we will then also be able to heal others. (p. 31)
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Thubten Zopa (Ultimate Healing: The Power of Compassion)
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When Si Will Eventually Take Over, Artisanal Handicraft Will Be The Ultimate Luxury
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Simone Puorto
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They had no memories of the past, no plans for the future while the present was everything. They were literally the orphans of the war, the rootless and the restless, the jobless and the economically deprived with little self-knowledge. They admired war because it was the only occupation they could possibly adapt to. Their simple belief in a messianic, puritan Islam which had been drummed into them by simple village mullahs was the only prop they could hold on to and which gave their lives some meaning. Untrained for anything, even the traditional occupations of their forefathers such as farming, herding or the making of handicrafts, they were what Karl Marx would have termed Afghanistan's lumpen proletariat.
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Ahmed Rashid (Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia)
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Discover the Wonders of Jaipur with Tejofyuk
Jaipur, also known as the Pink City, is a treasure trove of history, culture, and architectural marvels. Whether you're a history enthusiast, a culture lover, or simply someone seeking a break from the monotony, a Jaipur trip promises a unique experience. Tejofyuk is here to make your journey seamless and unforgettable with its unparalleled travel services.
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an elephant ride or walk up the steep pathways to explore this majestic structure.
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3.Hawa Mahal: Known as the "Palace of Winds," this iconic structure features hundreds of small windows designed to keep the palace cool.
4.Jaipur Markets: Shop for traditional jewelry, textiles, and handicrafts at Johari Bazaar and Bapu Bazaar to take a piece of Jaipur back home.
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Tips for a Successful Jaipur Trip
1.Plan Ahead: Make a list of places you want to visit and allocate sufficient time to explore each one.
2.Stay Hydrated: Jaipur’s climate can be hot, so keep a water bottle handy.
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Conclusion
A Jaipur tour is more than just a vacation; it’s an adventure into a world of timeless beauty and vibrant traditions. With Tejofyuk by your side, you’re guaranteed a hassle-free and enriching experience. Start planning your dream Jaipur trip today and let the Pink City captivate your heart. Book now with Tejofyuk and embark on a journey of a lifetime!
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tejofyuk
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Discover the Wonders of Jaipur with Tejofyuk
Jaipur, also known as the Pink City, is a treasure trove of history, culture, and architectural marvels. Whether you're a history enthusiast, a culture lover, or simply someone seeking a break from the monotony, a Jaipur trip promises a unique experience. Tejofyuk is here to make your journey seamless and unforgettable with its unparalleled travel services.
Why Plan a Jaipur Trip?
Jaipur offers something for everyone. From grand palaces and bustling markets to mouth-watering cuisine, every aspect of this city leaves a lasting impression. Here are some highlights that make a jaipur trip
irresistible:
1.Amber Fort: A stunning blend of Hindu and Mughal architecture, Amber Fort is a must-visit. Take
an elephant ride or walk up the steep pathways to explore this majestic structure.
2.City Palace: Situated in the heart of Jaipur, the City Palace offers a glimpse into royal living. Its intricate architecture and museum make it a highlight of any Jaipur trip.
3.Hawa Mahal: Known as the "Palace of Winds," this iconic structure features hundreds of small windows designed to keep the palace cool.
4.Jaipur Markets: Shop for traditional jewelry, textiles, and handicrafts at Johari Bazaar and Bapu Bazaar to take a piece of Jaipur back home.
How Tejofyuk Enhances Your Jaipur Tour
Planning and executing a memorable trip can be overwhelming, but with Tejofyuk, you can relax and enjoy every moment. Here’s how we make a difference:
1.Customizable Packages: Whether you’re traveling solo, with family, or in a group, Tejofyuk offers tailored packages to meet your needs.
2.Comfortable Travel Options: Our fleet includes a variety of vehicles, ensuring your journey is both comfortable and convenient.
3.Experienced Guides: Gain deeper insights into Jaipur’s rich history and culture with our knowledgeable guides.
4.Affordable Rates: Enjoy premium services without breaking the bank.
Tips for a Successful Jaipur Trip
1.Plan Ahead: Make a list of places you want to visit and allocate sufficient time to explore each one.
2.Stay Hydrated: Jaipur’s climate can be hot, so keep a water bottle handy.
3.Embrace Local Cuisine: Don’t miss out on trying dal baati churma, laal maas, and ghewar.
4.Book with Tejofyuk: Let us handle the logistics so you can focus on making memories.
Conclusion
A Jaipur tour is more than just a vacation; it’s an adventure into a world of timeless beauty and vibrant traditions. With Tejofyuk by your side, you’re guaranteed a hassle-free and enriching experience. Start planning your dream Jaipur trip today and let the Pink City captivate your heart. Book now with Tejofyuk and embark on a journey of a lifetime!
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Village economy in India, as elsewhere in monsoonal Asia, augmented crops and handicrafts with stores of free goods from common lands: dry grass for fodder, shrub grass for rope, wood and dung for fuel, dung, leaves and forest debris for fertilizer, clay for plastering houses, and, above all, clean water. All classes utilized these common property resources, but for poorer households they constituted the very margin of survival. In an outstanding study of a contemporary Gujarati village struggling with seasonality and drought, Martha Chen has shown how decisive nonmarket resources and entitlements remain for laborers and small farmers. "Standard definitions of work, worker and income," she writes, "do not capture how poor households generate livelihoods." In the village of Maatisar, (which she visited during the severe drought of 1985-87) fully 70 percent of the fuel and 55 percent of the fodder requirements of the poor are provided from free sources. The forest and pasture commons, which altogether generate thirty-five different useful products, "not only serve as a buffer against seasonal shortages, but also contribute to rural equity."
The British consolidated their rule in India by transferring control of these strategic resources from the village community to the state. "Among all the interventions into village society that nurtured the Anglo-Indian empire," David Ludden argues, "dividing public from private land stands out as the most important." Common lands - or "waste" in the symptomatic vocabulary of the Raj - were either transformed into taxable private property or state monopolies. Free goods, in consequence, became either commodities or contraband. Even cow dung was turned into a revenue source for Queen Victoria.
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Mike Davis