‚Fahrenheit 451‘ postulates a lot of things I didn’t want to have happen.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it is simply a tragedy.

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor – over each other.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

Look at our society. Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everyone wants to live long, but few will exercise. Everybody wants money, yet seldom will anyone budget or control their spending.

The very word ‚secrecy‘ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We’re obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not.

In America today, we are nearer a final triumph over poverty than is any other land.

Behind all their personal vanity, women themselves always have an impersonal contempt for woman.

The tyranny of a multitude is a multiplied tyranny.

Society can overlook murder, adultery or swindling; it never forgives preaching of a new gospel.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.

Our lifetime may be the last that will be lived out in a technological society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The middle class is so funny, it’s the class I know best, and it’s the class where you find the most pretension, so that’s what makes the middle classes so funny.

Of all the enemies of public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.

Never envy a man his lady. Behind it all lays a living hell.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Modern education has devoted itself to the teaching of impudence, and then we complain that we can no longer control our mobs.

It is violence when we use a sharp word, when we make a gesture to brush away a person. So violence isn’t merely organized butchery in the name of God, in the name of society or country. Violence is much more subtle, much deeper.

No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making.

I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.

Nobody believes in completely unadulterated capitalism.

In a higher phase of communist society… only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

There is precious little in civilization to appeal to a Yeti.

A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Great countries are those that produce great people.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

The ‚public‘ scares me, but people I trust.

The world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck.

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

I’m trying to make God more relevant in our society. And I think talking in everyday terms and making sure people can understand it – I think that’s important.

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.

Among those who dislike oppression are many who like to oppress.

Everyone got kind of crazy with me mentioning I was in love with a woman.

When I die, I’m gonna leave my body to science fiction.

I should tie myself to no particular system of society other than of socialism.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

If workers are more insecure, that’s very ‚healthy‘ for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations‘ economic health.

One can be instructed in society, one is inspired only in solitude.

The gift of loneliness is sometimes a radical vision of society or one’s people that has not previously been taken into account.

My music fights against the system that teaches to live and die.

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

Stop this attitude that older people ain’t any good anymore! We’re as good as we ever were – if we ever were any good.