51 Quotes by James P. Carse

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

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.

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.

The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.

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.

A prediction is but an explanation in advance.