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Thread: Fahrenheit 451 Quotes That Will Get You All Fired Up

  1. #1

    Fahrenheit 451 Quotes That Will Get You All Fired Up



    Fahrenheit 451 quotes feel unsettlingly familiar.


    George Orwell is often lauded as an oracle, but he is not the only novelist who deserves the title. In Fahrenheit 451 (named after the temperature at which paper burns), Ray Bradbury depicts a world where apathy and conformity are the norm. Controversial ideas – any thoughts more complex than wondering what’s on TV, really – are discouraged. Conflicting opinions aren’t tolerated. Books are flambéed en masse.


    Fahrenheit 451 tells the story of Guy Montag, a “fireman” whose job is to do the flambéing. Nearly everyone in Montag’s world is a vapid twit, and would no sooner pick up a book than they would a dead rat. Some thinkers persist, however, and they are dealt with harshly. Montag begins to question his purpose in life when an old woman, who owns a contraband library that he was dispatched to destroy, chooses to roast alongside her books rather than live without them.


    In a Promethean gesture, Montag cracks open some books he had squirreled away over the years and begins to read. This defiant act leads Montag to immolate his anti-intellectual boss and start life anew as a pariah, pursued all the while by monstrous Mechanical Hounds. (More prophecy – don’t imagine for a second that Boston Dynamics won’t offer their “robot dog” without optional gun mounts.)

    Fahrenheit 451 has a satisfying ending, though it feels appropriate to recommend that you read it for yourself.

    Book burnings are not some new thing. Still, we are now in an era of accelerating censorship. Utter anything online which Big Tech takes umbrage with and the word “suspended” looms in your immediate future. Attempt to teach the “wrong books” in public school and you might become a story on 60 Minutes. Try and rouse anger about the current state of affairs and prepare to be branded a wack-a-ding-hoy conspiracist.

    In time, the flamethrowers may not even be necessary. Controlling thought is pointless if no one is capable of it.

    Fahrenheit 451 Quotes

    “It was a pleasure to burn.”

    “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”

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

    “And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books.”

    “A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon.”

    “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.”

    “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.”

    “Nobody listens any more. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me. I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”

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

    “No one has time any more for anyone else.”

    “When they give you lined paper, write the other way.”

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

    “It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! it’s all over.”

    “With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.”

    “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?”

    “That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”

    “If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”

    “We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.”

    “What is there about fire that’s so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?’ Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. ‘It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did.”

    “If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. 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.”

    “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.”

    “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.”

    “‘Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic that any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that,’ he said, ‘shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.'”

    “But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and 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, ‘What nonsense!‘”

    “I don’t talk things … I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”

    “They say you retain knowledge even when you’re sleeping, if someone whispers in your ear.”

    “Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so … 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.”

    “We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over; so in a series of kindnesses there is at least one which makes the heart run over.”

    “We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. 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 under them. It can’t last.”

    “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.”

    Fahrenheit 451 Quotes That Will Get You All Fired Up originally appeared on Thought Grenades, the blog on Libertas Bella.
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  3. #2
    This book, along with 1984 and Brave New World are arguably the biggest pieces of fiction that have had profound impacts on me in regards to politics and philosophy (The Lord of the Rings and many other novels do the same for me but for different aspects of my life).

    I see those books happening now in front of us with all of this craziness.
    Welcome to the R3VOLUTION!

  4. #3
    Farenheit 451 taught me the difference between an informant and an informer.

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by Okie RP fan View Post
    This book, along with 1984 and Brave New World are arguably the biggest pieces of fiction that have had profound impacts on me in regards to politics and philosophy (The Lord of the Rings and many other novels do the same for me but for different aspects of my life).

    I see those books happening now in front of us with all of this craziness.
    It's not on par with the big three, in my opinion, but We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is also great dystopian fiction. Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron deserves an honorable mention as well.
    DeFi tutorials for noobs and normies. Merchandise for apes and chads who want to share the love with our libertarian clothing2nd Amendment shirts. "Liberty is beautiful" for all - only at Libertas Bella.

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by libertasbella View Post
    Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron deserves an honorable mention as well.
    Honorable mention? It should be required reading.

    HARRISON BERGERON by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

    THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

    Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

    It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair
    advantage of their brains.

    George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about. On the television screen were ballerinas. A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

    "That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

    "Huh" said George.

    "That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

    "Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

    George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

    Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

    "Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

    "I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

    "Um," said George.

    "Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."

    "I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

    "Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."

    "Good as anybody else," said George.

    "Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.

    "Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

    "Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

    It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

    "All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch."

    She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

    George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

    "You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

    "Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."

    "If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."

    "If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

    "I'd hate it," said Hazel.

    "There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

    If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

    "Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

    "What would?" said George blankly.

    "Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?

    "Who knows?" said George.

    The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen." He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

    "That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

    "Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men. And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

    "Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

    A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall. The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

    Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

    And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

    "If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."

    There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges. Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

    George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"

    The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

    When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
    Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

    "I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook. "Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

    Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
    Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor. Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

    He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

    "I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

    A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow. Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask. She was blindingly beautiful.

    "Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded. The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."

    The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

    The music began again and was much improved.

    Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it. They shifted their weights to their toes. Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers. And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang! Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the
    laws of motion as well.

    They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

    They leaped like deer on the moon.

    The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it. It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it. And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended In air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

    It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor. Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

    It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out. Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer. George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

    "Yup," she said.

    "What about?" he said.

    "I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

    "What was it?" he said.

    "It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

    "Forget sad things," said George.

    "I always do," said Hazel.

    "That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.

    "Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

    "You can say that again," said George.

    "Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."
    Last edited by acptulsa; 07-09-2021 at 12:34 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  7. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by libertasbella View Post
    It's not on par with the big three, in my opinion, but We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is also great dystopian fiction. Vonnegut's short story Harrison Bergeron deserves an honorable mention as well.
    I actually have We on my book case (along with everything aforementioned). I've had it for years but haven't read it yet.
    And Harrison Bergeron... I know I've heard of it but can't recall if I've read it or not. I'll need to look into that one again.
    Welcome to the R3VOLUTION!

  8. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Okie RP fan View Post
    I actually have We on my book case (along with everything aforementioned). I've had it for years but haven't read it yet.
    And Harrison Bergeron... I know I've heard of it but can't recall if I've read it or not. I'll need to look into that one again.
    So look. It's post #5.

    Don't just talk about it...
    Quote Originally Posted by Swordsmyth View Post
    We believe our lying eyes...

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by acptulsa View Post
    Honorable mention? It should be required reading.

    Hey don't get me wrong, I love Vonnegut and have read all his work. It's only an honorable mention because it's short enough to paste into a forum comment.
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