James C Scott Quotes

#1. It took about one century for them [the negative consequences] to show up clearly. Many

James C. Scott

#2. 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

#3. The larger the pile of rubble you leave behind, the larger your place in the historical record!

James C. Scott

#4. 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

#5. The power to gossip is more democratically distributed than power, property, and income, and, certainly, than the freedom to speak openly.

James C. Scott

#6. That frontier operated as a rough and ready homeostatic device; the more a state pressed its subjects, the fewer subjects it had. The frontier underwrote popular freedom.

James C. Scott

#7. Encouragement of sedentarism is perhaps the oldest "state project," a project related to the second-oldest state project of taxation.

James C. Scott

#8. 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

#9. The world of rumors and gossip is a world of wish fulfillment. And one of the things that gives volume and amplitude to a rumor is that it satisfies people's dreams and expectations about the world.

James C. Scott

#10. 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

#11. In a world of injustice there's going to be dreams of justice.

James C. Scott

#12. It seems to me that rumors and dreams of justice are part of a dialectic of injustice and dreams of justice will be with us for as long as there's injustice, and that doesn't seem to be in short supply.

James C. Scott

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Granted, the Scott Paper story is one of the more dramatic in our study, but it's not an isolated case. In over two thirds of the comparison cases, we noted the presence of a gargantuan personal ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.33

James C. Collins

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. I decided that since peasants were the largest segment of the world's population, it would be an honorable and worthy career to devote my life to the study of peasants and agriculture.

James C. Scott

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery - Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy - were Democrats.

Dinesh D'Souza

#23. It's hard to see any institutional structure that stands in the way of the homogenization and simplification of the supply chains in international capitalism, unless it is the nation state.

James C. Scott

#24. We must never assume that local practice conforms with state theory.

James C. Scott

#25. Because I want to have sex with him
and because that's sinful
I'm blushing and flushing furiously under his scrutinizing scrutiny.

Jess C. Scott

#26. What's interesting to me is that in the late twentieth century it seems that there's scarcely a part of the world that doesn't have some capitalist return that can be realized providing that this area's made accessible and resources can be extracted from it.

James C. Scott

#27. I was trained as a political scientist and the profession bores me, to be frank. I am truly bored by mainstream work in my discipline, which strikes me as a kind of medieval scholasticism of a special kind.

James C. Scott

#28. Ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.

James C. Scott

#29. 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

#30. Only an elaborate treatise in ecology could do justice to the subject of what went wrong,

James C. Scott

#31. I spent nearly two years in a small village - perhaps seventy families. I've never worked harder or learned so much so fast in my life; as an anthropologist you are at work from when you open your eyes in the morning to when you close them at night.

James C. Scott

#32. The world of rumor and gossip is like a privileged world with which a social scientist or an anthropologist can take the temperature of popular aspirations.

James C. Scott