In “Fahrenheit 451,” censorship manifests as a societal poison that impedes intellectual freedom and happiness.
The government enforces censorship by banning and burning books.
Ray Bradbury illustrates how censorship leads to a superficial society devoid of genuine emotion and critical thought. Individuals turn to artificial means, such as pills and mindless entertainment, to mask their unhappiness.
The destruction of literature strips the populace of knowledge and signifies the erasure of cultural and historical identity. It’s epitomized by the haunting image of books being reduced to ashes.
Fahrenheit 451 Censorship Quotes With Page Numbers
“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?”
He laughed. “That’s against the law!”
“Oh. Of course.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Clarisse McClellan and Guy Montag), Pages 5, 6
In this quote, Clarisse McClellan asks Guy Montag if he has ever read the books he burns. Her question ignites his curiosity about books. Are books bad just because they are illegal? If so, why is reading illegal?
17 Clarisse McClellan Quotes With Page Numbers
“Monday burn Millay, Wednesday Whitman, Friday Faulkner, burn ’em to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our official slogan.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Guy Montag), Page 6
In this quote, Montag tells Clarisse the fireman’s slogan. Their job is to destroy all literature, even to burn the ashes. How productive can a society be if people’s sole purpose is to destroy?
30 Guy Montag Quotes With Page Numbers
“Why aren’t you in school? I see you every day wandering around.”
“Oh, they don’t miss me,” she said. “I’m antisocial, they say. I don’t mix. It’s so strange. I’m very social indeed. It all depends on what you mean by social, doesn’t it? Social to me means talking to you about things like this.” She rattled some chestnuts that had fallen off the tree in the front yard. “Or talking about how strange the world is. Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing ‘chicken’ and ‘knock hubcaps.’ I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal. ”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Guy Montag and Clarisse McClellan), Page 27
In this quote, Clarisse tells Montag that schools don’t let the students talk to each other. They don’t have time to think or create. The schools keep the students busy learning propaganda and other unproductive activities. After school, students have no energy except for mindless entertainment.
“How inconvenient! Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim’s mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren’t hurting anyone, you were hurting only things! And since things really couldn’t be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don’t scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who’s got a match!”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Guy Montag’s thoughts told by narrator), Page 35
This quote reflects Guy Montag’s unsettling realization of his role in burning books. It extends beyond inanimate objects, confronting the humanity and potential suffering behind the targeted censorship.
This moment marks a disturbance in Montag’s conscience, as he perceives the act of book burning, once justified as a simple cleanup, to involve deeper moral implications.
“Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I’d never even thought that thought before…
It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it’s all over.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Guy Montag), Page 49
In this reflective moment, Guy Montag profoundly realizes the human effort and life encapsulated within books. This starkly contrasts the destructive simplicity of his role as a fireman who burns them.
Censorship removes the benefit of learning from another person’s experiences over a lifetime. This dooms us to repeat the same mistakes every generation.
We also lose the compounding of knowledge. It takes a lifetime to create and two minutes to destroy, over and over.
Fahrenheit 451 Quotes About Books
“Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple the population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 51
In this quote, Captain Beatty argues that as the population grows, a variety of books causes problems. The power of books comes from valuing the differences.
Different books, ideas, and experiences allow us to synergize. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole. With a variety, we can compensate for each other’s weaknesses with other’s strengths. Censorship tries to keep everyone equal, resulting in mediocrity.
Mildred Montag Quotes With Page Numbers
“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.” “Snap ending.” Mildred nodded. “Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), 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.” Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down. Beatty ignored her and continued: “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! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!” Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back. And perhaps cry out and stare or simply reach down her hand and say, “What’s this?” and hold up the hidden book with touching innocence. “School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 52
“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, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex-magazines, of course. 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. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 55
“With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 55
“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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 55
“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door…Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 56
“[Firemen] were given a new job, as custodians of our peace of mind, the focus of our understandable and rightful dread of being inferior; official censors, judges, and executors.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 56
“Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 57
Fahrenheit 451 Quotes About Fire With Page Numbers
“The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That’s why we’ve lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we’re almost snatching them from the cradle.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 57
“If you don’t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. 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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 58
“Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so 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. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 58
“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. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. 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.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 58
“Remember, Montag, we’re the happiness boys. We stand against the small tide of those who want to make everyone unhappy with conflicting theory and thought.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Captain Beatty), Page 59
“No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn’t want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says the architects got rid of the front porches because they didn’t look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden underneath, might be they didn’t want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong KIND of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Guy Montag, thoughts told by the narrator), Page 60
“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless. We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of growing on good rain and black loam.”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Profesor Faber), Page 79
“But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority”
~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, about censorship (Profesor Faber), Page 104
25 Important Fahrenheit 451 Quotes Meaning Explained
What does censorship symbolize in Fahrenheit 451?
In Fahrenheit 451, censorship symbolizes the oppressive power of a controlling government that seeks to stifle individual thought and maintain unrestricted control over society.
It represents the systematic obliteration of knowledge, intellectual growth, and personal freedom. Burning books, a prime symbol of censorship in the book, underscores the government’s strategy of keeping its citizens ignorant to prevent dissent and maintain homogeneity.
Fahrenheit 451 Censorship Theme Analysis
“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury presents a dystopian world where books are outlawed, and firemen are tasked with burning any they find. Censorship is the primary theme throughout this novel.
Below is a detailed analysis of the censorship theme, as illustrated by key passages from the book:
Bradbury envisages a future society where the written word is forbidden due to its inherent ability to inspire and stimulate independent thought. Censorship in the book, represented by burning books, is to maintain societal compliance and uniformity.
The quote, “Do you ever read any of the books you burn?..That’s against the law!” directly represents censorship in the novel. The society around the character Guy Montag criminalizes reading, pushing the populace to ignorance.
Guy Montag, the protagonist, transforms as he starts questioning the ban on literature.
His inner dialogue, “Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up…” illustrates his dawning enlightenment on the printed word’s value.
Montag’s gradual awakening to the suppression enforced by his society is symbolized by his realization of the value of the books he has been burning for years. His understanding that “a man was behind each one of the books” signifies his growing consciousness of the censorship he partakes in and marks the beginning of his rebellion against it (Page 49).
Clarisse McClellan’s character contrasts the censored society, drawing attention to her non-conformist attitude.
Bradbury’s satirical view of society is evident when Clarisse McClellan recounts her daily routine, which discourages individual thought and maintains societal norms. The system doesn’t allow asking questions, just providing pre-determined answers: an indirect form of censorship.
Montag’s superior, Captain Beatty, rationalizes this systemic censorship with the quote, “Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there…But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple the population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm”.
His viewpoint illustrates the perceived need for censorship to preserve societal harmony amidst a growing population.
The harsh and brutal methods the state uses to silence citizens, as depicted in Montag’s reflection, “The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim’s mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars…”, further highlight the extensive censorship and control prevalent in the society.
Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” paints a grim picture of a future society grappling with severe censorship.
The burning of books symbolizes rampant censorship, the society’s war against knowledge, and its attempt to create a population devoid of individualized thinking.