Fahrenheit 451 Quotes

“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios, and televisors, but are not. No,no it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type or receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when i say all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
― Juan Ramón Jiménez, Invisible Reality

“That's the wonderful thing about man; he never gets so discouraged or disgusted that he gives up doing it all over again, because he knows very well it is important and WORTH the doing.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the Universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beating and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for their are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute. And so when houses were finally fireproofed completely, all over the world (you were correct in your assumption the other night) there was no longer need of firemen for the old purposes. They were given the new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior: official censors, judges and executors. That's you, Montag, and that's me.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.”
― Ray Bradbury

“You can't ever have my books.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Pasamos la vida entera aprendiendo a olvidar cosas que en realidad están dentro”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The important thing for you to remember, Montag, is we're the Happiness Boys, the Dixie Duo, you and I and the others. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought. We have our fingers in the dike. Hold steady. Don't let the torrent of melancholy and drear philosophy drown our world. We depend on you. I don't think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex. If the drama is bad, if the film says nothing, if the play is hollow, sting me with the theremin, loudly. I'll think I'm responding to the play, when it's only a tactile reaction to vibration. But I don't care. I just like solid entertainment.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montage.
“You can’t ever have my books,” she said.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The zipper displaces the button, and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and this a melancholy hour.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“È perché siamo così ricchi e il resto del mondo è così povero e a noi non importa nulla che lo sia? Ho sentito strane voci circolare; il mondo sta morendo di fame, ma noi siamo ben pasciuti. È proprio vero che mentre il mondo stenta e suda, noi ci balocchiamo, giochiamo? È per questo che siamo tanto odiati? Ho sentito anche voi dire di quest'odio ogni tanto, negli anni. Sai perché ci odiano tanto? Se lo sai, dimmelo, perché io non lo so davvero! Forse i libri possono aiutarci a uscire un po' da queste tenebre. Potrebbero impedirci di ripetere sempre gli stessi errori pazzeschi! Mai che sentissi quei furfanti idioti del tuo salotto dire qualcosa in proposito! Dio, Millie, non vedi? Un'ora al giorno, due ore, con questi libri e forse...”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The books are to remind us what asses and fool we are. They’re Caeser’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, “Remember, Caeser, thou art mortal.” Most of us can’t rush around, talking to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”
― Ray Bradbury

“When we stop thinking, we stop caring.”
― Azar Nafisi, Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies... [Books] show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people only want wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.”
― Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?'
He laughed. 'That's against the law!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You think too many things,' said Montag, uneasily.”
― Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

“And if you look' — she nodded at the sky — 'there's a man in the moon.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“[...] Someone else's blood there. If only someone else's flesh and brain and memory. If only they could have taken her mind along to the dry-cleaner's and emptied the pockets and steamed and cleansed it and reblocked it and brought it back in the morning. If only...”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“These men were all mirror-images of himself!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There was a tiny dance of melody in the air, her Seashell was tamped in her ear again and she was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fantoms of blackness above her in the ceiling.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman, drunk, coming home late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“[...] For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451