- "You always dread the unfamiliar...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 there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against."
- "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"
- "Cram them full of noncombustible 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."
- "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 all this. You are intuitively right, that's what counts. Three things are missing. Number one: Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture...Telling detail. Fresh detail. 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...And the second? Leisure. Oh, but we've plenty of off-hours. Off-hours, yes. But time to think?...And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two."
- "We're nothing more than dust jackets for books, of no significance otherwise."
- "But 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."
What I got out of it
- A prophetic book which I think describes today's world to some degree. People take pride in always "busy" - almost often unnecessarily - that they don't stop and think about what they're actually doing or why. Also, there are so many different factions that need to be pleased that writing can easily become very "vanilla tapioca" as Bradbury puts it. On the other hand, Bradbury also pointed out that these different groups and interests help ensure that there never is too much censorship.