How we cite our quotes: (Book.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"You know what I say, right? In situations like this, I agree with the Hague, with human rights activists the world over. There needs to be accountability. Tyrants can no longer hide. There needs to be, and will be, documentation and accountability, and we need to bear witness. And to this end, I insist that all that happens should be known."
The words dropped onto the screen:
ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN. (1.8.65-67)
The Circle's Eamon Bailey puts all of his stock in knowledge. According to him, unlimited access to information will help to build a better world. But what's to stop people from using their newfound knowledge in unwise—or even dangerous—ways?
Quote #2
"Instead of searching the web, only to find some edited video with terrible quality, now you go to SeeChange, you type in Myanmar. Or you type in your high school boyfriend's name. Chances are there's someone who's set up a camera nearby, right? Why shouldn't your curiosity about the world be rewarded? You want to see Fiji but can't get there? SeeChange. You want to check on your kid at school? SeeChange. This is the ultimate transparency. No filter. See everything. Always." (1.8.79)
We're pretty sure that if any Circler ever uttered the words "curiosity killed the cat" in Eamon Bailey's presence, that person would be fired on the spot and would find him- or herself unable to land a job anywhere ever again.
Quote #3
"Now let's experiment a bit, using all of this together. I'm sitting at home. I log on and want to get a sense of the world. Show me traffic on 101. Streets of Jakarta. Surfing at Bolinas. My mom's house. Show me the webcams of everyone I went to high school with."
At every command, new images appeared, until there were at least a hundred live streaming images on the screen at once.
"We will become all-seeing, all-knowing." (1.8.85-87)
Eamon Bailey is a churchgoer, so it's a little surprising that he never realizes how closely his career is playing out the biblical story of the Fall. Eve didn't taste the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because she was super hungry—she wanted to see and understand the world in just the same way that her creator saw it. Sound like anyone we know?
Quote #4
There were leopard sharks in this part of the bay, and bat rays, and jellyfish, and the occasional harbor porpoise, but she could see none of them. They were hidden in the dark water, in their black parallel world, and knowing they were there, but not knowing where, or really anything else, felt, at that moment, strangely right. (1.10.19)
This is one of the first and few moments in The Circle when we see Mae Holland demonstrating a bit of wisdom for once. Her sense of the "rightness" of not being able to know everything about the watery world underneath her kayak stands in sharp contrast to Eamon Bailey's assumption that the Circle's technologies will allow human beings to "become all-seeing, all-knowing" (1.8.85-87).
Quote #5
"I mean, all this stuff you're involved in, it's all gossip. It's people talking about each other behind their backs. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication." (1.19.55)
Of all of The Circle's characters, Mercer Medeiros is the one who is used most often to express the novel's own authorial perspective. According to Mercer, many of the Circle's tools aren't generating knowledge at all—instead, they're simply making it seem as though gossip, hearsay, and conjecture are the same things as truth.
Quote #6
"What'd they look like?" the man asked, and when Mae described them, the grey glassine heads, the man glanced to the woman. "Stevie and Kevin."
The woman nodded in recognition.
"I think the others are further out today, hunting. Stevie and Kevin don't leave this part of the bay too often. They come here all the time to say hello." (1.21.54-56)
The anonymous couple Mae Holland finds floating in a ramshackle houseboat on the San Francisco Bay demonstrate a kind of genuine knowledge that few other characters in The Circle have access to. This couple has made a point of getting to know their surroundings in a personal, organic way. They can differentiate between the harbor seals that they see day after day, and they don't need an app to do it.
Quote #7
Mae didn't know enough about antitrust laws to have an off-the-cuff opinion. Was there really no competition out there? The Circle had 90 percent of the search market. Eighty-eight percent of the free-mail market, 92 percent of text servicing. That was, in her perspective, a simple testament to their making and delivering the best product. It seemed insane to punish the company for its efficiency, for its attention to detail. For succeeding. (1.27.5)
No offense, Mae, but there are a lot of things you don't know enough about. On top of antitrust laws, we might add data storage, historical workers' rights movements, the history of American democracy, and the distinctions between private corporations and democratic governments. Not that we've made a list or anything.
Quote #8
"And I would argue that any place in the world where gays are still persecuted, you could instantly achieve great progress if all the gays and lesbians came out publicly at once. Then whoever is persecuting them, and all those who tacitly support this persecution, would realize that to persecute them would mean persecuting at least 10 percent of the population—including their sons, daughters, neighbors and friends—even their own parents. It would be instantly untenable. But the persecution of gays or any minority group is made uniquely possible through secrecy." (1.44.89)
Is it, though? In order to defend his whole "secrets are lies" deal to Mae, Eamon Bailey conveniently ignores the many, many examples of minority groups that have been persecuted when their identities were out in the open. Bailey's folksy ideas may seem profound and wise—Mae certainly buys into them pretty darn quickly—but they leave out a whole lot of nuance and detail. And let's not even get started on the idea of forcibly outing LGBT people. Bailey clearly has no idea what he's talking about.
Quote #9
There were old printers, fax machines, telex devices, letterpresses. The decor, of course, was for show. All the retro machines were nonfunctional. The news gatherers, whose faces were now upon Mae, smiling, saying hello to her and her watchers, were able to do most of their reporting via SeeChange. There were now over a hundred million cameras functional and accessible around the world, making in-person reporting unnecessarily expensive and dangerous, to say nothing of the carbon expenditures. (2.1.61)
Dave Eggers has a background in journalism, so it's not hard to imagine that this aspect of the Circle's approach to knowledge and information would be particularly irksome to him. The thing about journalists—and here we're thinking of strong investigative journalists—is that they're not simply there to record things that happen. They also help us understand what's going on and give us some perspective on what we're seeing. Can the Circle's news gatherers do this from the company newsroom? Pretty doubtful.
Quote #10
There was little reason to leave campus for meals given that Bailey, hoping to engender more discussions and brain-sharing and socialization among Circlers, had instituted a new policy, whereby all food would be not only free, as it always had been, but prepared daily by a different notable chef. The chefs were happy for the exposure […] and the program was instantly and wildly popular and the cafeterias were overflowing with people and, presumably, ideas. (2.3.1)
Throughout The Circle, Dave Eggers suggests that part of the problem with the Circle's company model is that it encourages groupthink. By encouraging Circlers to spend more and more time on campus with each other and less and less time with the outside world, the Circle's executives help to ensure that the company's employees are primed to accept whatever passes for knowledge and wisdom within their closed-off, isolated sphere.