Books 451 Quotes & Sayings

Interestingly, the British government announced a few weeks ago that they were going to introduce 500 educational targets for preschool children. And teachers complained that "when are the children going to have time to play?" Well, they're not supposed to play, because play is a right-brain, ad-lib, creative pursuit. The idiot politicians who are introducing it don't understand this, but the shadow-people from which it is generated certainly do. They want to stimulate the left brain as early as possible. — David Icke

I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition. (Said to Leopold Mozart) — Joseph Haydn

There was no semblance of remorse on his stone-like face. He wanted me. That's all there was to it. And he would have me, regardless if I wanted him to or not. — Baylee Crush

It was a pleasure to burn.
It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning. — Ray Bradbury

And the people who would burn the words, the people who would take the books from the shelves, the firemen and the ignorant, the ones afraid of tales and words and dreams and Hallowe'en and people who have tattooed themselves with stories and Boys! You Can Grow Mushrooms in Your Cellar! and as long as your words which are people which are days which are my life, as long as your words survive, then you lived and you mattered and you changed the world and I cannot remember your name.

I learned your books. Burned them into my mind. In case the firemen come to town. — Neil Gaiman

I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books. — Ray Bradbury

There's a lot of imagination in Asia, and I believe that the next Google will come from there, and the next Pixar. I believe that the great new media companies will come out of Asia and surpass the big media conglomerates that exist right now in the West. — Shekhar Kapur

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand. — David Davis

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

Having reached 451 books as of now doesn't help the situation. If I were to be dying now, I would be murmuring, "Too bad! Only four hundred fifty-one." (Those would be my next-to-last words. The last ones will be: "I love you, Janet.") [They were. -Janet.] — Isaac Asimov

I'll be like in that movie, that one where all the people walk around recitin' the books they memorized after all the books were burned. Form a retreat, a cult of over-specialized cold warriors like me. Recite the blue pubs, the yellow pubs, the red pubs, the black pubs. Muttering men keeping the data alive. — James W. Blinn

When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people. — Ray Bradbury

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 — Ray Bradbury

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

You can't ever have my books. — Ray Bradbury

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.) — Christopher Hitchens

Time and distance have a way of playing tricks with your best intentions. — Anthony Kiedis

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. — Ray Bradbury

Take a look at my family, a different father every weekend. — Tupac Shakur

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

right from the start of Fahrenheit 451 everybody on the unit has begun to read. There are often hundreds of books on the set; each member of the unit chooses one, and sometimes you can hear nothing but the sound of turning pages. Wednesday, — Ray Bradbury

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

Sitcom hours are silly easy compared to drama. Whenever an actor on a sitcom complains, I feel like smacking them! — Tricia Helfer

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

Just like an ordinary guitar string, a fundamental string can vibrate in different modes. And it is these different modes of vibration of the string that are understood in string theory as being the different elementary particles. — Lee Smolin

Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people. — Zack Snyder

When the external factors over which one has no control in a way start to become negative, it starts to affect our creative juices. — Stephen Covey

Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how amazing the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it. — Josh Lieb

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. Books
are to remind us what asses and fools we are.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury — Ray Bradbury

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

Imagine watching all that God might have done with your life if you had let him. — John Ortberg