Ray Bradbury Quotes

I wonder how many men, hiding their youngness, rise as I do, Saturday mornings, filled with the hope that Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam and Daffy Duck will be there waiting as our one true always and forever salvation? -"Why Cartoons Are Forever", Los Angeles Times, Dec. 3, 1989.

The jails are full of one million non-readers. We can't let it happen again. If you allow another generation to grow up to be 12 years old.... without the ability to read, write, and think, we're sunk. If they can't read, if they can't write, if they can't think, they become criminals. We've already lost two generations. Unless we teach reading intensely and completely in kindergarten and first grade, the whole civilization goes to hell.

If we listened to our intellect we'd never have a love affair. We'd never have a friendship. We'd never go in business because we'd be cynical: "It's gonna go wrong." Or "She's going to hurt me." Or,"I've had a couple of bad love affairs, so therefore . . ." Well, that's nonsense. You're going to miss life. You've got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.

Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.

There was a silly damned bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been first cousin to man. But every time he burnt himself up, he get imself born all over again. And it looks as though we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we've got one damn thing the pheonix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, some day we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and junping in the middle of them. -Fahrenheit 451

It was a pleasure to burn. It was a speacial pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. -Fahrenheit 451

Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain porridge unleavened literature, licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme. -"Coda" 1979

They came to apply sociological laws; they came with stars and badges and rules and regulations... They began to instruct and push about the very people who had come to Mars to get away from being instructed and ruled and pushed about. And it was inevitable that some of these people pushed back... -"The Naming of Names" Martian Chronicles

...There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves -"Usher II." Martian Chronicles

Every man, they said, must face reality...So they lined them up against a library wall one Sunday morning thirty years ago in 1975; they lined them up, St. Nicolas and the Headless Horseman and Snow White and Rumplestiltskinand Mother Goose - oh what a wailing - and shot them down, and burned all the paper castles and the fairy frogs and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More! And they spread the ashes of the Phantom Rickshaw with the rubble of the Land of Oz; they filleted the bones of Glinda the Good and Ozma and shattered Polychrome in a spectroscop and served Jack Pumpkinhead with meringue at the Biologists' Ball! The Beanstalk died in a bramble of red tape! Sleeping Beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientistand expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe. And they made Alice drink something from a bottle which reduced her to a size where she could no longer cry "Curiouser and curiouser," and they gave the Looking Glass one hammer blow to smash it and every Red King and Oyster away! -"Usher II," Martian Chronicles

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