Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because it now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear. Each of us has relinquished to the other what has been relinquished to the other.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“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

“Winning a war can be as destructive as losing one, for if boundaries lose their clarity, as they do in a decisive victory, the state loses its identity. 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

“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.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Since a culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other, we may say that a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Since culture is horizonal it is not restricted by time or space.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line; it has no place; it encloses no field; its location is always relative to the view. To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Because patriotism is the desire to contain all other finite games within itself—that is, to embrace all horizons within a single boundary—it is inherently evil.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The theatricality of property has, in fact, an elaborate structure that property owners must be at considerable labor to sustain. If property is to be persuasively emblematic, that is, if it is to draw attention to the owner’s titles in past victories, a double burden falls on its owners: First, they must show that the amount of their property corresponds to the difficulty they were under in winning title to it. Property must be seen as compensation. Second, they must show that the type of their property corresponds to the nature of the competition by which title to it was won. Property must be seen to be consumed.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“While societal thinkers may not overlook the importance of poiesis, or creative activity, neither may they underestimate its danger, for the poietai are the ones most likely to remember what has been forgotten—that society is a species of culture.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The deepest and most consequent struggle of each society is therefore not with other societies, but with the culture that exists within itself—the culture that is itself. Conflict with other societies is, in fact, an effective way for a society to restrain its own culture. Powerful societies do not silence their poietai in order that they may go to war; they go to war as a way of silencing their poietai. Original thinkers can be suppressed through execution and exile, or they can be encouraged through subsidy and flattery to praise the society’s heroes. Alexander and Napoleon took their poets and their scholars into battle with them, saving themselves the nuisance of repression and along the way drawing ever larger audiences to their triumph.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Art that is used against a society or its policies gives up its character as infinite play, and aims for an end. Such art is no less propaganda than that which praises its heroes with high seriousness.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“For this reason it can be said that where a society is defined by its boundaries, a culture is defined by its horizon. A boundary is a phenomenon of opposition. It is the meeting place of hostile forces. Where nothing opposes there can be no boundary. One cannot move beyond a boundary without being resisted. This is why patriotism—that is, the desire to protect the power in a society by way of increasing the power of a society—is inherently belligerent.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Patriots can flourish only where boundaries are well-defined, hostile, and dangerous.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“The purpose of property is to make our titles visible. Property is emblematic. It recalls to others those areas in which our victories are beyond challenge.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“What the winner of a finite game wins is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. I cannot entitle myself. Titles are theatrical, requiring an audience to bestow and respect them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“One of the most effective means of self-persuasion available to a citizenry is the bestowal of property. Who actually owns a society’s property, and how it is distributed, are far less important than the fact that property exists at all.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Just as an infinite game has rules, a culture has a tradition. Since the rules of play in an infinite game are freely agreed to and freely altered, a cultural tradition is both adopted and transformed in its adoption.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“As we have seen, because an infinite game cannot be brought to an end, it cannot be repeated. Unrepeatability is a characteristic of culture everywhere.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished in the past.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Society is a manifestation of power. It is theatrical, having an established script. Deviations from the script are evident at once. Deviation is antisocietal and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions. It is easy to see why deviancy is to be resisted.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Society is a manifestation of power.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Culture, on the other hand, is an infinite game. Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture—anywhere and at any time.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“This does not mean that infinite players are politically disengaged; it means rather that they are political without having a politics, a paradoxical position easily misinterpreted. To have a politics is to have a set of rules by which one attempts to reach a desired end; to be political—in the sense meant here—is to recast rules in the attempt to eliminate all societal ends, that is, to maintain the essential fluidity of human association.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“NO ONE CAN PLAY a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion. It is evil to act as though the past is bringing us to a specifiable end. It is evil to assume that the past will make sense only if we bring it to an issue we have clearly in view. It is evil for a nation to believe it is “the last, best hope on earth.” It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamicization of all living infidels. Your history does not belong to me. We live with each other in a common history. Infinite players understand the inescapable likelihood of evil. They therefore do not attempt to eliminate evil in others, for to do so is the very impulse of evil itself, and therefore a contradiction. They only attempt paradoxically to recognize in themselves the evil that takes the form of attempting to eliminate evil elsewhere.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong. Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games