There is more than one way to burn a book

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There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/FourSquareGospel 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.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451: A Novel

2 thoughts on “There is more than one way to burn a book”

  1. Luckily I finished High School in 1974, with no one stoping me from reading the Science Fiction and Fantasy section.

    It was filled with books where mutant children survived oppression from the Government. Held captive on a planet at the edge of the galaxy, to keep the galaxy “safe”. They were able to escape the world using their powers, to jump to the next galaxy.

    And I became a Civil Engineer because I read Mysterious Island, where castaways built an entire industrial base using science and what was in their pockets when they arrived on the island.

    There are many books that are crap, no doubt, but most kids will read what works for them if they have access to a wide variety, and have not been rendered braindead or fragile by the system beforehand.

    I think that it would be fair to say that I was radicalized, and possibly the most dangerous kid at school, because of the books I read.

    – Every person I know who have read thousands of books have a better grasp of reality than most people.

    That is dangerous today.

    Which is the heart of Fahrenheit 451, which was one of the first books I read since I more or less read the entire section over my four years, alphabetically.

  2. The biggest danger to ideas isn’t just the militant minorities but cowed majorities unwilling to defend the ideas that best serve society who bow to the idiots.

    Volume doesn’t equal rationality.

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