Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 Quotes

I often wonder if God recognizes His own son the way we've dressed him up, or is it dressed him down?

The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.

But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

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 heading for shore.

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.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

It doesn't matter what you do...so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

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.

I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.

Digression is the soul of wit. Take the philosophic asides away from Dante, Milton or Hamlet's father's ghost and what stays is dry bones.

Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!

These are all novels, all about people that never existed, the people that read them it makes them unhappy with their own lives. Makes them want to live in other ways they can never really be.

The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.

Remember, Montag, we're the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.

Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school.

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

...passing swiftly on toward further darknesses, but moving also toward a new sun.

Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you to know with which ear you'll listen.

Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.

He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.

See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.

It doesn't think anything we don't want it to think.''That's sad, ' said Montag, quietly, 'because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that's all it can ever know.

He felt that the stars had been pulverized by the sound of the black jets and that in the morning the earth would be covered with their dust like a strange snow.

You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by.

Fire is bright and fire is clean.

If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.

He was part of us and when he died, all the actions stopped dead and there was no one to do them just the way he did.

Happiness is important. Fun is everything.

I'm seventeen and I'm crazy.

Let the war turn off the families. Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.

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 a well-read man?

We are all bits and pieces of history and literature and international law.

Are you happy?

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for the things he did. I cried because he would never do them again...

For if we're destroyed, the knowledge is dead...We're nothing more than dust jackets for books...so many pages to a person...

Why is it, " he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?""Because I like you, " she said, "and I don't want anything from you.

The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are.

The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

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.

I'm afraid of them and they don't like mebecause I'm afraid.

I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid.

There must be something in books, things we can't imagine.

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.

Fiction gives us empathy: It puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Self-conciousness is the enemy of all creativity.

And a lot of it will be wrong, but just enough of it will be right.

We need to make progress. Otherwise we're waiting for news in a world where there is no longer any news.

Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words.

My feet, " said Montag. "I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won't