We cannot fathom why people would stand across the street, easily a hu — Dave Eggers

"I speak to these people, and I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. I covet your eyes, your ears, the collapsible space between us. How blessed are we to have each other? I am alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there. How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist."

"There are people who meet strangers and people, like me, who know only those they’ve known from birth"

"You and yours at the Circle, youre gonna save all the souls. Youre gonna get everyone in one place, youre gonna teach them all the same things. There can only be one morality, one set of rules. Imagine! Now all humans will have the eyes of God. You know this passage? All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of God. Something like that. You know your Bible? Now were all God. Every one of us will soon be able to see, and cast judgment upon, every other. Well see what He sees. Well articulate His judgment. Well channel His wrath and deliver His forgiveness. On a constant and global level. All religion has been waiting for this, when every human is a direct and immediate messenger of Gods will. Do you see what Im saying?"

"Its not that Im not social. Im social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact youre purveying. It improves nothing. Its not nourishing. Its like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much salt and fat they need to include to keep you eating. Youre not hungry, you dont need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what youre pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories, but the digital-social equivalent. And you calibrate it so its equally addictive."

"— Mr. Churchill you were given a mission. — Yes — I want to have been given your mission. I want your place in world events, the centrality of it. You were born in the cradle of a catapult! — You are wrong. I found my mission. — I disagree. — If you must. — Tell me: where is my mission? Where are my bunkers and trenches, my goddamn Gallipoli?"

"Ooh, look at me, I’m Dave, I’m writing a book! With all my thoughts in it. La la la!"

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"With much care and skill power has been broken into fragments in the American township, so that the maximum possible number of people have some concern with public affairs."

"The people reign over the American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"I appeal to all pupils, students and young people, asking you to focus on the horizons that are opening up for you, and which you could only dream of a year ago. Our future will depend on your desire for education and moral values as well as on your entrepreneurial spirit."

"We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems."