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"Das letzte Mal, dass ich mit dem Teufel sprach, war er nackt, sichtlich sexuell erregt und eine Frau."

— Identitti by Mithu M. Sanyal

Although the geometric, uniform forest was intended to facilitate management and extraction, it quickly became a powerful aesthetic as well. The visual sign of the well-managed forest, in Germany and in the many settings where German scientific forestry took hold, came to be the regularity and neatness of its appearance.

— Seeing like a state by James C. Scott (Page 18)

Once you have crafted lenses that change your perspective, it is a great temptation to look at everything through the same spectacles.

I do, however, want to plead innocent to two charges that I do not think a careful reading would sustain. The first charge is that my argument is uncritically admiring of the local, the traditional and the customary. I understand that the practical knowledge I describe is often inseparable from the practices of domination, monopoly, and exclusion that offend the modern liberal sensibility. My point is not that practical knowledge is the product of some mythical, egalitarian state of nature. Rather, my point is that formal schemes of order are untenable without some elements of the practical knowledge that they tend to dismiss.

The second charge is that my argument is an anarchist case against the state itself. The state, as I make abundantly clear, is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our freedoms and our unfreedoms. My case is that certain kinds of states, driven by utopian plans and and authoritarian disregard for the values, desires, and objections of their subjects, are indeed a mortal threat to human well-being.

— Seeing like a state by James C. Scott (Page 7)

Originally, I set out to understand why the state has always been the enemy of "people who move around," to put it crudely. In the context of Southeast Asia, this promised to be a fruitful way of addressing the perennial tensions between mobile, slash-and-burn hill peoples on one hand and wet-rice, valley kingdoms on the other. The question, however, transcended regional geography. Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, run-away slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project - perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.

— Seeing like a state by James C. Scott (Page 1)