The strategy of infinite players is horizonal. They do not go to meet putative enemies with power and violence, but with poiesis and vision. They invite them to become a people in passage. Infinite players do not rise to meet arms with arms; instead, they make use of laughter, vision, and surprise to engage the state and put its boundaries back

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.

Finite players go to war against states because they endanger boundaries; infinite players oppose states because they engender boundaries.

War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.

A people, as a people, has nothing to defend. In the same way a people has nothing and no one to attack.

culture is sometimes opposed by suppressing its ideas, its works, even its language. This is a common strategy of a society afraid of the culture growing within its boundaries. But it is a strategy certain to fail, because it confuses the creative activity (poiesis) with the product (poiema) of that activity.

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.

This is why every new participant in a culture both enters into an existing context and simultaneously changes that context. Each new speaker of its language both learns the language and alters it. Each new adoption of a tradition makes it a new tradition—just as the family into which a child is born existed prior to that birth, but is nonetheless

To enter a culture is not to do what the others do, but to do whatever one does with the others.