Top 37 James C. Scott Quotes of All time - Quotes.Pub

Here you will find all the famous James C. Scott quotes. There are more than 37 quotes in our James C. Scott quotes collection. We have collected all of them and made stunning posters out of those quotes so you can use James C. Scott quotes wallpapers and images to share on the various social media platforms. You can download the quotes posters in various different sizes for free.

One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay "in shape" so that when the big day comes you will be ready . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
Designed or planned social order is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order. This truth is best illustrated in a work-to-rule strike, which turns on the fact that any production process depends on a host of informal practices a . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
Not so very long ago, however, such self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as “our living ancestors,” “what we were like before we discovered wet-rice cultivation, Buddhism and civilization.” on the contrary, I argu . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in its imperial rhetoric, as a 'civilizing mission'.

-James C. Scott
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We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory.

-James C. Scott
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A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speakers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a language, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammarians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heav . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
New World escape crops made the economics of escape as tempting as its politics. Colonial officials tended to stigmatize cassava and maize as crops of lazy natives whose main aim was to shirk work. In the New World, too, those whose job it was to drive the population into wage labor o . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
Nothing could be further from the truth. All identities, without exception, have been socially constructed: the Han, the Burman, the American, the Danish, all of them. Quite often such identities, particularly minority identities, are at first imagined by powerful states, as the Han i . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
But all these systems of ‘education’ lack provisions for freedom of experiment, for training and for expression of creative abilities by those who are to be taught. In this respect also all our pedagogues are behind the times.

-James C. Scott
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immanent in their willingness to break the law was not so much a desire to sow chaos as a compulsion to instate a more just legal order. To the extent that our current rule of law is more capacious and emancipatory than its predecessors were, we owe much of that gain to lawbreakers.

-James C. Scott
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The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor’s office . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
Given a choice between patterns of subsistence that are relatively unfavorable to the cultivator but which yield a greater return in manpower or grain to the state and those patterns that benefit the cultivator but deprive the state, the ruler will choose the former every time. The ru . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

-James C. Scott
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Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as policemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, “the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cit . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest "state project," a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation.

-James C. Scott
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The utopian, immanent, and continually frustrated goal of the modern state is to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations.

-James C. Scott
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Gossip is perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression. Though its use is hardly confined to attacks by subordinates on their superiors, it represents a relatively safe social sanction. Gossip, almost by definition has no identifiable author, but score . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a “civilizing mission.

-James C. Scott
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After seizing state power, the victors have a powerful interest in moving the revolution out of the streets and into the museums and schoolbooks as quick as possible, lest the people decide to repeat the experience.

-James C. Scott
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results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

-James C. Scott
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Planners frequently destroyed “unslumming slums” because these areas violated their doctrines

-James C. Scott
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Slums were the first foothold of poor migrants to the city.

-James C. Scott
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It is time someone put in a good word for the petite bourgeoise. Unlike the working class and capitalists, who have never lack for spokespersons, the petite bourgeoise rarely, if ever, speaks for itself.

-James C. Scott
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Center for Disease Control in Atlanta is a striking case in point. Its network of sample hospitals allowed it to first “discover”—in the epidemiological sense—such hitherto unknown diseases as toxic shock syndrome, Legionnaire’s disease, and AIDS.

-James C. Scott
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The petite bourgeoise and small property in general represent a precious zone of autonomy and freedom in state systems increasingly dominated by large public and private bureaucracies.

-James C. Scott
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What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.

-James C. Scott
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The cultivation of a single staple grain was, in itself, an important step in legibility and hence, appropriation. Monoculture fosters uniformity at many different levels. . .A society shaped powerfully by monoculture was easier to monitor, assess, and tax than one shaped by agricultural diversity.

-James C. Scott
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Who could anticipate or provide for such a succession of hopes and services?” Her answer is simple: “Only an unimaginative man would think he could; only an arrogant man would want to.

-James C. Scott
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The great flaw of all these administrative techniques is that, in the name of equality and democracy, they function as a vast "antipolitics machine", sweeping vast realms of legitimate public debate out of the public sphere and into the arms of technical, administrative committees. Th . . . Read more

-James C. Scott
Why the histories of states should have so persistently insinuated themselves in the place that might have been occupied by peoples merits reflection.

-James C. Scott
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