Farenheit 451 Quotes

“I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I'll show you my collection some day."
"Good."
"They want to know what I do with my time. I tell them that sometimes I just sit and think. But I won't tell them what. I've got them running. And sometimes, I tell them, I like to put my head back, like this, and let the rain fall in my mouth. It tastes just like wine. Have you ever tried it?”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“...We're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.”
― Ray Bradbury

“To everything there is a season. Yes. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Yes. A time to keep silence and a time to speak.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Three things are missing...

...Quality, texture of information... leisure”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know I'm drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns run into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I don't talk things, sir,' said Faber.
'I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I'm numb, he thought. When did the numbness really begin in my face? In my body?

...The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“It's not books you need, it's some of the things that were once in books. The same things could be in the "parlour 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 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. Of course you couldn't know this, of course you still can't understand what I mean when I say this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.'

'So that's what I am.'

'There's some of it in all of us.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy,”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade-journals.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“...instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators,...”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“They were given a 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

“I want to be happy, people say.
Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? that's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Cram them full of non-combustable data, chock them so damn full of "facts" they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“You're brave.'

'No,' said Montag. 'My wife's dying. A friend of mine's already dead. Someone who may have been a friend was burnt less than twenty-four hours ago. You're the only one I knew might help me. To see. To see...”
― Ray bradbury

“The televisor is "real". It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and it blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest,...'

'My wife says books aren't "real".'

'Thank God for that. You can shut them and say, "Hold on a moment." You play God to it...'

'It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“After all, when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“What is fire?

...It's real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“He shaped the world.
He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“They lay blinking their dusty eyelids.

...Montag sat up.

He did not move any further, however. The other men did likewise. The sun was touching the black horizon with a faint red tip.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“...but we've got one damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years, and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddam funeral pyres and jumping into the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I cannot possibly tell you what an exciting adventure it was, day after day, attacking that rentable machine, shoving in dimes, pounding away like a crazed chimp, rushing upstairs to fetch more dimes, running in and out of the stacks, pulling books, scanning pages, breathing the finest pollen in the world, book dust, with which to develop literary allergies.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Lo que usted anda buscando está en el mundo, pero el único medio para que una persona corriente vea el noventa y nueve por ciento de ello está en un libro.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“No importa lo que hagas, en tanto que cambies algo al respecto a como era antes de tocarlo, convirtiéndolo en algo que sea como tú después de que separes de ello tus manos.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of “facts” they feel stuffed, but absolutely “brilliant” with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy. Any many who can take a TV wall apart and put it back together again, and most men can nowadays, is happier than any man who tried to slide-rule, measure, and equate the universe, which just won’t be measured or equated without making man feel bestial and lonely. I know, I’ve tried it; to hell with it. So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your dare-devils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, and 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