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

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

I happen to be a big fan of Western civilization; I think it beats the hell out of tyranny and starvation.

No group and no government can properly prescribe precisely what should constitute the body of knowledge with which true education is concerned.

Part of your heritage in this society is the opportunity to become financially independent.

No one has done a study on this, as far as I can tell, but I think Facebook might be the first place where a large number of people have come out. We didn’t create that – society was generally ready for that. I think this is just part of the general trend that we talked about, about society being more open, and I think that’s good.

Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

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.

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.

Regardless of what society says, we can’t go on much longer in the sea of immorality without judgment coming.

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

If society fits you comfortably enough, you call it freedom.

Society is at odds with itself.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

I got into science fiction by being interested in astronomy first.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Modesty forbids what the law does not.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society.

Society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.

Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.

Governments are not representative. They have their own power, serving segments of the population that are dominant and rich.

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

Too many of us now tend to worship self indulgence and consumption.

By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation.

Optimism comes less easily today, not because democracy is less vigorous, but because democracy’s enemies have refined their instruments of repression.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

Children are all foreigners.

While victimhood in America is exalted, I don’t think our veterans should join those ranks.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

What we have found in this country, and maybe we’re more aware of it now, is one problem that we’ve had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless, you might say, by choice.

If a country is to be corruption free and become a nation of beautiful minds, I strongly feel there are three key societal members who can make a difference. They are the father, the mother and the teacher.

We are right to take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

When a politician uses the word ‚folks,‘ we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

The people of England are the most enthusiastic in the world.

Babylon is everywhere. You have wrong and you have right. Wrong is what we call Babylon, wrong things. That is what Babylon is to me. I could have born in England, I could have born in America, it make no difference where me born, because there is Babylon everywhere.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

It is hard to read a newspaper or watch a television newscast without encountering someone who has come up with a new ‚solution‘ to society’s ‚problems.‘

I myself have been on my own and utterly independent since I graduated. I haven’t belonged to any company or any system. It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.

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.

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

Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.

I am neither bitter nor cynical but I do wish there was less immaturity in political thinking.

The society based on production is only productive, not creative.

If the structures of the human mind remain unchanged, we will always end up re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction.

I would just like to say something, ladies and gentlemen. Something that I think is very important. It is that, you, we – we own this country. We – we own it. It is not you owning it, and not politicians owning it. Politicians are employees of ours.

At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.

The mind of America is seized by a fatal dry rot – and it’s only a question of time before all that the mind controls will run amuck in a frenzy of stupid, impotent fear.

To cut short the question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent, and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence?

There are websites that any government wants to block. The truth about the Internet is that it’s extremely hard to block anything – extremely hard. You’ll never get perfect blocking.

Let’s not burn the universities yet. After all, the damage they do might be worse.