Quotes from James P. Carse

While a machine greatly aids the operator in such tasks, it also disciplines its operator. As the machine might be considered the extended arms and legs of the worker, the worker might be considered an extension of the machine. All machines, and especially very complicated machines, require operators to place themselves in a provided location and to perform functions mechanically adapted to the functions of the machine. To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine.

Victories occur in time, but the titles won in them are timeless. Titles neither age nor die.

When we forget that knowledge rises from ignorance and think of it instead as a way of overcoming ignorance, knowledge can have the ironic effect of limiting our vision.

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.

Surprise in infinite play is the triumph of the future over the past. Since infinite players do not regard the past as having an outcome, they have no way of knowing what has been begun there. With each surprise, the past reveals a new beginning in itself. Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing.

Just as the warmakers of Europe regularly melted down the bells to recast them into cannon, the metaphysicians have found the meaning of their myths and announced those meanings without their narrative resonance.

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).

Since finite games are played to be won, players make every move in a game in order to win it. Whatever is not done in the interest of winning is not part of the game. The constant attentiveness of finite players to the progress of the competition can lead them to believe that every move they make they must make.

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. 30

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.

Fields of play simply do not impose themselves on us. Therefore, all the limitations of finite play are self-limitations.

Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by death. Immortality, in this case, is not a reward but the condition necessary to the possession of rewards. Victors live forever not because their souls are unaffected by death but because their titles must not be forgotten.

Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past.

Titles are given at the end of play, names at the beginning.

The titled are powerful. Those around them are expected to yield, to withdraw their opposition, and to conform to their will—in the arena in which the title was won.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance.

Waste is the antiproperty that becomes the possession of losers. It is the emblem of the untitled.

The exercise of power always presupposes resistance. Power is never evident until two or more elements are in opposition.

Power is always measured in units of comparison. In fact, it is a term of competition: How much resistance can I overcome relative to others?

Power is a concept that belongs only in finite play.

Being undivided, nature cannot be used against itself. We do not therefore consume it, or exhaust it. We simply rearrange our societal patterns in a way that reduces our ability to respond creatively to the existing patterns of spontaneity. That is, to use the societal expression, we create waste. Waste, of course, is by no means unnatural. The trash and garbage of a civilization do not befoul nature; they are nature-but in a form society no longer is able to exploit for its own ends.

The issue is whether we are ever willing to drop the veil and openly acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we have freely chosen to face the world through a mask.

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.

If we defer to titled winners, it is only because we regard ourselves as losers. To do so is freely to take part in the theater of power.