Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“But responsibility for the garden does not mean that we can make a garden of nature, as though it were a poiema of which we could take possession. A garden is not something we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is a poiesis, a receptivity to variety, a vision of differences that leads always to a making of differences. The poet joyously suffers the unlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing, possesses nothing.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“A people does not become superfluous by itself, any more than natural waste creates itself. It is society that declares some persons to be waste. Human trash is not an unfortunate burden on a society, an indirect result of its proper conduct; it is its direct product. European settlers in the American, African, and Asian continents did not happen to come upon populations of unwanted persons nature had thrust their way; they made them superfluous by way of the some of the most important and irreversible principles of their societies.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Waste persons are those no longer useful as resources to a society for whatever reason, and have become apatrides, or noncitizens. Waste persons must be placed out of view-in ghettos, slums, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves, remote territories, strategic hamlets-all places of desolation, and uninhabitable. We live in a century whose Master Players have created many millions of such "superfluous persons" (Rubenstein).”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Waste is unveiling, because it persists in showing itself as waste, and as our waste. If waste is the result of our indifference to nature, it is also the way we experience the indifference of nature. Waste is therefore a reminder that society is a species of culture. Looking about at the wasteland into which we have converted our habitation, we can plainly see that nature is not whatever we want it to be; but we can also plainly see that society is only what we want it to be.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Since a flourishing society will vigorously exploit its natural resources, it will produce correspondingly great quantities of trash, and quickly its uninhabited lands will overflow with waste, threatening to make the society's own habitation into a wasteland.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Society regards its waste as an unfortunate, but necessary, consequence of its activities-what is left when we have made essential societal goods available. But waste is not the result of what we have made. It is what we have made. Waste plutonium is not an indirect consequence of the nuclear industry; it is a product of that industry.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Since machinery requires force from without, its use always requires a search for consumable power. When we think of nature as resource, it is as a resource for power. As we preoccupy ourselves with machinery, nature is increasingly thought of as a reservoir of needed substances. It is a quantity of materials that exist to be consumed, chiefly in our machines.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Not everyone who uses machinery is a killer. But when the use of machinery springs from our attempt to respond to the indifference of nature with an indifference of our own to nature, we have begun to acquire the very indifference to persons that has led to the century's grandest crimes by its most civilized nations.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The fact that the technology of slaughter at vast distances has become extremely sophisticated does not culturally advance its highly trained operators over club-swinging primitives; it makes complete the blindness that was but rudimentary in the primitive. It is the supreme triumph of resentment over vision. We are the unseeing killing the unseen.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When machinery functions perfectly it ceases to be there-but so do we. Radios and films allow us to be where we are not and not be where we are. Moreover, machinery is veiling. It is a way of hiding our inaction from ourselves under what appear to be actions of great effectiveness. We persuade ourselves that, comfortably seated behind the wheels of our autos, shielded from every unpleasant change of weather, and raising or lowering our foot an inch or two, we have actually traveled somewhere.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The paradox in our relation to nature is that the more deeply a culture respects the indifference of nature, the more creatively it will call upon its own spontaneity in response. The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Nature's source of movement is always from within itself; indeed it is itself. And it is radically distinct from our own source of movement. This is not to say that, possessing no order, nature is chaotic. It is neither chaotic nor ordered. Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature-the degree to which nature's indifferent spontaneity seems to agree with our current manner of cultural self-control. A hurricane, or a plague, or the overpopulation of the earth will seem chaotic to those whose cultural expectations are damaged by them and orderly to those whose expectations have been confirmed by them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Certain machines of extraordinary complexity have been built: spacecraft, for example, that sustain themselves for months in the void while performing complicated functions with great accuracy. But no machine has been made, nor can one be made, that has the source of its spontaneity within itself. A machine must be designed, constructed, and fueled.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“There is no narrative without structure, or plot. In a great story this structure seems like fate, like an inescapable judgment descending on its still unaware heroes, a great metaphysical causality, that crowds out all room for choice. Fate arises not as a limitation on our freedom, but as a manifestation of our freedom, testimony that choice is consequent. The exercise of your freedom cannot prevent the exercise of my own freedom, but it can determine the context in which I am to act freely. You cannot make choices for me, but you can largely determine what my choices will be about. Great stories explore the drama of this deeper touching of one free person by another. They are therefore genuinely sexual dramas astounding us once more with the magic of origins.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Because it is address, attending always on the response of the addressed, infinite speech has the form of listening. Infinite speech does not end in the obedient silence of the hearer, but continues by way of the attentive silence of the speaker. It is not a silence into which speech has died, but a silence from which speech is born.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Speaker and listener understand each other not because they have the same knowledge about something, and not because they have established a likeness of mind, but because they know "how to go on" with each other (Wittgenstein).”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor is horizonal, reminding us that it is one's vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The silence to which the losers pledge themselves is the silence of obedience. Losers have nothing to say; nor have they an audience who would listen. The vanquished are effectively of one with the victors, and of one mind; they are completely incapable of opposition, and therefore without any otherness whatsoever.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“What one wins in a title is the privilege of magisterial speech. The privilege of magisterial speech is the highest honor attaching to any title. We expect the first act of a winner to be a speech. The first act of the loser may also be a speech, but it will be a speech to concede victory, to declare there will be no further challenge to the winner. It is a speech that promises to silence the loser's voice.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Imposed silence is the first consequence of the Master Player's triumph.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If nature is the realm of the unspeakable, history is the realm of the speakable. Indeed, no speaking is possible that is not itself historical. Students of history, like students of nature, often believe they can find unbiased, direct views of events. They look in on the lives of others, noting the multitude of ways those lives have been limited by the age in which they were lived. But no one can look in on an age, even if it is one's own age, without looking out of an age as well. There is no refuge outside history for such viewers, any more than there is a vantage outside nature.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“A prediction is but an explanation in advance.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When I speak as the genius I am, I speak these words for the first time. To repeat words is to speak them as though another were saying them, in which case I am not saying them. To be the genius of my speech is to be the origin of my words, to say them for the first, and last, time. Even to repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another person in another time and place.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“I am the genius of myself,the poietes who composes the sentences I speak and the actions I take. It is I, not the mind,that thinks. It is I, not the will, that acts. It is I, not the nervous system, that feels.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Plato suggested that some of the poets be driven out of the Republic because they had the power to weaken the guardians. Poets can make it impossible to have a war-unless they tell stories that agree with the "general line" established by the state. Poets who have no metaphysics, and therefore no political line, make war impossible because they have the irresistible ability to show the guardians that what seems necessary is only possible.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility