Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“Just as Alexander wept upon learning he had no more enemies to conquer, finite players come to rue their victories unless they see them quickly challenged by new danger. A war fought to end all wars, in the strategy of finite play, only breeds universal warfare.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The strategy of finite players is to kill a state by killing the people who invented it. Infinite players, however, understanding war to be a conflict between states, conclude that states can have only states as enemies; they cannot have persons as enemies. "Sometimes it is possible to kill a state without killing a single one of its members; and war gives no right which is not necessary to the gaining of its object" (Rousseau). For infinite players, if it is possible to wage a war without killing a single person, then it is possible to wage war only without killing a single person.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If as a people infinite players cannot go to war against a people, they can act against war itself within whatever state they happen to reside. In one way their opposition to war resembles that of finite players: Each is opposed to the existence of a state. But their reasons and the strategies for attempting to eliminate states are radically different. Finite players go to war against states because they endanger boundaries; infinite players oppose states because they engender boundaries.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“It is the impulse of a finite player to go against another nation in war, it is the design of an infinite player to oppose war within a nation.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“One is never ill in general. One is always ill with relation to some bounded activity. It is not cancer that makes me ill. It is because I cannot work, or run, or swallow that I am ill with cancer. The loss of function, the obstruction of an activity, cannot in itself destroy my health. I am too heavy to fly by flapping my arms, but I do not for that reason complain of being sick with weight. However, if I desired to be a fashion model, a dancer, or a jockey, I would consider excessive weight to be a kind of disease and would be likely to consult a doctor, a nutritionist, or another specialist to be cured of it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Artistry can be found anywhere; indeed, it can only be found anywhere. One must be surprised by it. It cannot be looked for. We do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Only by free self-concealment can persons believe they obey the law because the law is powerful; in fact, the law is powerful for persons only because they obey it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“We look on childhood and youth as those “times of life” rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can be more easily amended than those of adulthood.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Evil is not the attempt to eliminate the play of another according to published and accepted rules, but to eliminate the play of another regardless of the rules. Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power. It is the forced recognition of a title—and therein lies the contradiction of evil, for recognition cannot be forced. The Nazis did not compete with the Jews for a title, but demanded recognition of a title without competition. This could be achieved, however, only by silencing the Jews, only by hearing nothing from them. They were to die in silence, along with their culture, without anyone noticing, not even those who managed the institutions and instruments of death.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition. Whichever element can move another is the more powerful.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“While no one is forced to remain a lawyer or a rodeo performer or a kundalini yogi after being selected for these roles, each role is nonetheless surrounded both by ruled restraints and expectations on the part of others. One senses a compulsion to maintain a certain level of performance, because permission to play in these games can be canceled. We cannot do whatever we please and remain lawyers or yogis—and yet we could not be either unless we pleased.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“What is your future, and mine, becomes ours. We prepare each other for surprise.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“They are valid only if and when players freely play by them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public. They are for others to notice. I expect others to address me according to my titles, but I do not address myself with them—unless, of course, I address myself as an other. The effectiveness of a title depends on its visibility, its noticeability to others.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent. It possesses the same dynamic of resentment found in other finite play. I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think others think I do.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as though nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with each other we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence. It is, in fact, seriousness that closes itself to consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: James Carse

“The alternative attitudes toward nature can be characterized in a rough way by saying that the result of approaching nature as a hostile Other whose designs are basically inimical to our interests is the machine, while the result of learning to discipline ourselves to consist with the deepest discernable patterns of natural order is the garden.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Infinite speakers do not give voice to another, but receive it from another. Infinite speakers do not therefore appeal to a world as audience, do not speak before a world, but present themselves as an audience by way of talking with others. Finite speech informs another about the world—for the sake of being heard. Infinite speech forms a world about the other—for the sake of listening.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Knowledge, therefore, is like property. It must be published, declared, or in some other way so displayed that others cannot but take account of it. It must stand in their way. It must be emblematic, pointing backward at its possessor’s competitive skill. So close are knowledge and property that they are often thought to be continuous. Those who are entitled to knowledge feel they should be granted property as well, and those who are entitled to property believe a certain knowledge goes with it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Augustine, the most famous convert of antiquity, was puzzled that he could have held so firmly to so many different falsehoods; he was not astounded that there are so many different truths. His conversion was not from explanation to narrative, but from one explanation to another. When he crossed the line from paganism to Christianity, he arrived in the territory of a truth beyond further challenge.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“One does not cross over from Manichaeism to Christianity, or from Lamarckianism to Darwinism, by a mere adjustment of views. True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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

“There is no such thing as an unnatural act. Nothing can be done to or against nature, much less outside it. Therefore, the ignorance we thought we could avoid by an unclouded observation of nature has swept us back into itself. What we thought we read in nature we discover we have read into nature. “We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg).”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“nature allows no master over itself.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The assumption guiding our struggle against nature is that deep within itself nature contains a structure, an order, that is ultimately intelligible to the human understanding”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“To use Freud’s famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore, the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but become civilized as losers. The collective result of this ineradicable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience, they are easily offended by other civilizations.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games