Very few books have the wealth of quotes that Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” has: rich in metaphor and allegory, thematically apt, and presented in language so lyrical it is pleasant to the ear. Reading an excerpt of the quotes in this book alone can give you a clear enough impression of the book’s message.
Knowledge and Ignorance
One of the themes of “Fahrenheit 451” is knowledge, and this topic is challenging to avoid in a book about book burning. Ray Bradbury gives us a clear view of how an agent of knowledge is treated in a society pledged to ignorance.
“You can’t ever have my books.”
Old lady whose house the firemen burn; Part 1, Section 3
In Part One of the novel, Montag and the firemen respond to a book-burning alarm, and they find this is the house of an old lady with a library installed inside. She chooses to self-immolate rather than stand by while the firemen burn down her house. She refuses to surrender to the forces that hinder the spread of knowledge, symbolically refusing to give up her right to individual expression, intellectual freedom, and self-determination.
“There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.”
Guy Montag, discussing the old woman’s self sacrifice with his wife; Part 1, Section 4
When Guy Montag witnesses the old lady set herself ablaze rather than watch her books be torched, he is shaken by her self-sacrifice. His curiosity is sparked, and he risks stealing a book from the pile meant to be destroyed to discover for himself what value books have to inspire such devotion. He begins to doubt his role in society by being a fireman and tries to interest his wife Mildred in his new epiphany, but she will have none of it. She is visibly distressed when he shows her his illegal hoard of books.
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories
Granger to Montag, as the city starts burning; Part 3, Section 3
At the end of the book, Montag is part of the wilderness-dwelling exiles who retain their love for books and freedom. An air strike destroys the city they had lived in while they watch from the wilderness they now call home. Granger shares that even though the city and all its attractions are gone, there’s still much to be experienced in the natural world around them, more attractive than what was lost to flames. This sentiment is noteworthy because Granger and his group have set themselves as record keepers for the new age and have tasked themselves with witnessing and remembering everything about their world.
“I don’t talk things, sir,” said Faber. “I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I’m alive.”
Professor Faber to Guy Montag on their first meeting; Part 2 Section 1
After the conversation with Captain Beatty, Montag tries to read and is distressed that he cannot assimilate what he reads. He remembers meeting Faber, a professor at the university, a year before the events of the book in a park. Faber’s words distinguish him from the rest of the people in the society both for what he says and for being capable of conceiving such a difference. This makes Faber stand out in Montag’s mind when his ignorance begins to plague him, and his curiosity and appetite for knowledge grows. Faber implies that, unlike most people in their society, and like Clarisse, he wants to know the whys of things and is interested in values. While the society of “Fahrenheit 451” multiplies distractions and has everyone in a mindless busyness, Faber is content to sit by himself in nature and figure out the world on his terms.
“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.”
Professor Faber to Montag, when Montag approaches him to teach him how to read; Part 2 Section 1
Fired with his new passion for literacy, Montag contacts Faber. He wants Faber to help him preserve books, thinking books have a magical power of salvation. Faber responds this way by implying that books in themselves cannot save society or even anyone, for that matter. Each seizes opportunities to help themselves through reading to dispel ignorance or in any other way. Guy learns through this that a book is no silver bullet against man’s trouble but can be a light on the path to improvement or better chances.
“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.”
Granger to Guy Montag in the wilderness; Part 3 Section 3
When Montag escapes the city and meets the bibliophile exiles, Granger gives him an orientation of the community Guy joins. To explain their founding purpose, Granger says they are record keepers because there are no listeners, and they fear that essential ideas and information may be lost. He stresses to Montag the futility of telling people things they don’t wish to pay attention to. In their time of need, they will come looking for it, and then it will be essential to have people like them committed to preserving the knowledge in books.
“The zipper displaces the button and a man lacks just that much time to think while dressing at dawn, a philosophical hour, and thus a melancholy hour.”
Captain Beatty to Guy Montag, at Montag’s house; Part 1, Section 5
Captain Beatty visits Guy at his home after he calls in sick. Beatty suspects Montag may not be ill but is troubled and dissatisfied and may soon turn rebellious. He engages him in a philosophical talk about the general state of their world. Captain Beatty reflects on how the zipper replaced the button in this muse. The button represents activities that take time and attention, slow people down, and could get them thinking. With its express service, the zipper gives man no time for reflection. He seeks similar convenience in seeking packaged entertainment from parlor walls instead of the challenging but more profoundly satisfying task of reading books.
Technology and Censorship
The overarching background to the story of “Fahrenheit 451” is the advancement of technology to the extent that it takes over aspects of the lives of their citizens. They are entertained and fed with propaganda and easily-digested media and are deprived of the opportunity for self-directed exploration. They are discouraged from any activity that leads to individual thought.
“Now let’s take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers… There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.
Captain Beatty to Montag, at Montag’s home; Part 1, Section 5
This was part of Beatty’s conversation with Montag when he visited Montag, who was home because he was sick. Beatty explains to Montag that the government did not step in to curb the spread of information and impose the book ban. Instead, the citizens’ intolerance of differing views ultimately led to the book ban. This statement’s significance is that a totalitarian state’s oppression might only result from the aggregation of all petty intolerances by its different constituent demographics.
“’It doesn’t think anything we don’t want it to think.’
‘That’s sad,’ said Montag, quietly, ‘because all we put into it is hunting and finding and killing. What a shame if that’s all it can ever know.”
Montag to Beatty, at the fire station; Part 1, Section 3
Montag visits the fire station one day and is disturbed because he gets a sense of animosity from the hound. When he mentions this, Beatty assures him that the hound has no mind but acts on its programming. Here, Montag mentions the depressing inhumanity of creating so powerful a tool and setting it up solely for violent uses. A mechanical hound is a killing machine with no sense of right or wrong, but it was let loose in society to act according to set instructions. In some way, this reflects on people in his society, who are told what to think and do by their mass media. We find the use of foreshadowing here because Montag’s fears come true later, and the hound is eventually set after him.
“Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending…. Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last … But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet…, whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.” … “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes!”.
Captain Beatty to Montag, at Montag’s home; Part 1, Section 5
Continuing their conversation, Beatty presents the idea that in their fast-paced society, everything of meaning is truncated to a meaningless blurb and fed to the populace. In their hurry, no one has the time to stop and reflect on how empty this existence is.
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
Captain Beatty to Montag, at Montag’s home; Part 1, Section 5
In continuing his talk with Montag, Beatty wonders about the dangers books pose. According to him, the most troublesome danger is the inability to predict and thereby control the thoughts and actions of the well-read. As the mouthpiece of the authorities in “Fahrenheit 451“, we can assume that Captain Beatty’s sentiment is the fear of the government that sanctions burning books. This connects with Beatty’s statement elsewhere in the book, stating that books multiply questions and do not often give certainty as answers. If the well-read find answers from reading that do not conform with the simple, dumb, and frequently misleading ones provided by the state, the oppressive state will have a hard time controlling the dissident individuals. The oppressive state may even find the counternarrative of the readers challenging the sanctioned ideas the state promotes to serve their interests.
Connection to People
A recurrent theme in Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” is how people lose their ability to truly connect and feel others for who they are in the bombardment of vapid messages and content from the mass media. Everyone is forced to relate to made-up experiences and stories that offer only distraction from the affairs of life.
“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?”
Montag, while his wife and friends are entertained by the TV; Part 2 Section 2
After returning from Faber’s, Montag finds Mildred and her friends convened in his sitting room, engrossed in a televised program and participating in banal conversation. This appears to be a regular event they engage in as friends. The women, rather than address the pressing problems in their lives, brush off the seriousness of their conditions, choosing to parrot the media talking points to create a false sense of calm. They treat an ongoing war that takes the lives of their loved ones as an inconsequential event but are consumed by the fictional lives of their soap opera characters. Disgusted at their soporific passivity, Guy Montag shuts off the TV to the distressed protest of the women. In confronting Mildred’s friends, Montag reprimands them for their indifference towards the actual events in their lives and their preference to lose themselves in the superficial world presented to them in the media. Like drug addicts, they retreat into fantasy rather than deal with the harsh and uncomfortable reality of the world of “Fahrenheit 451″.
“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.
“It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”
Granger to Montag, in the wilderness by the old rail tracks; Part 3, Section 3
When he escapes from the hounds that pursue him from the city, Montag meets the bibliophile exiles for the first time, notes they don’t appear impressive, and worries about his wife in the town. Granger tries to reorient Montag’s perspective on the world. He argues that people die, but they live through the things they leave behind their deliberate and creative works, and their activities that show particular and thoughtful attention. Through these things, they leave evidence of their individuality, their having existed as a thinking being. In this way, Granger mourns that the city dwellers never expressed this faculty more than their possible imminent destruction saddens him.
“Why is it,” he said, one time, at the subway entrance, “I feel I’ve known you so many years?”
“Because I like you,” she said, “and I don’t want anything from you.”
An exchange between Clarisse and Montag; Part 1, Section 3
In one of his meetings with Clarisse, Guy Montag asks her this question after they have been friends for a while. He is puzzled by his strong and strange attraction to her. In his meeting with Clarisse, Montag feels he is interacting with a real person for the first time. Because she is open to experience, he connects with her more strongly in the short time he knows her than even his wife, whom he’d known for years. In a world of fleeting and casual relationships with people to whom one relates superficially, a Clarisse who wants to explore others for their unique essence is rare and special.
“And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.”
Montag muses, in regard to the characters in his wife’s favorite TV program; Part 1, Section 4
After the incident where the firemen burn the old lady’s house (and partly as a result of this), Montag calls in sick and stays home from work. He is pestered by the TV noise that entertains his wife. He tries to get his wife to show concern for his health and take a moment away from the TV to attend to him. Or at least turn down the volume. She does not comply. Guy Montag vainly argues with his wife about the emptiness of the programs presented by the media. He calls them hollow, even when Mildred insists they are alive and real. He points out that they lack life connections, substantial relationships, and existential grounding for all their activity. Montag paints a picture of the media-generated world as a sparky but lifeless experience. Worse, they draw people away from the real people around them.
