Quotes About Influence

Todos deben dejar algo al morir, decía mi abuelo. Un niño o un libro o un cuadro o una casa o una pared o un par de zapatos. O un jardín. Algo que las manos de uno han tocado de algún modo. El alma tendrá entonces adonde ir el día de la muerte, y cuando la gente mire ese árbol, o esa flor, allí estará uno. No

qué piensa el Sabueso allá abajo, toda la noche? ¿Somos nosotros los que lo animamos realmente? Me da frío. –Sólo piensa lo que queremos que piense. –Sería triste –dijo Montag en voz baja–, pues sólo ponemos en él ideas de caza, persecución y muerte. Qué lástima si eso es todo lo que sabe.

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.

And when he died, I suddenly realized I wasn't crying for him at all, but for all the things he did.

Un libro, en manos de un vecino, es un arma cargada. Quémalo.

Un libro, en manos de un vecino, es un arma cargada. Quémalo. Saca la bala del arma. Abre la mente del hombre. ¿Se sabe acaso quién puede ser el blanco de un hombre leído? ¿Yo? No puedo aceptarlo.

Impossible; for how many people did you know that refracted your own light to you?

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!

So, for thousands of years, you humans have needed kings, priests, philosophers, fine examples to look up to and say, 'They are good, I wish I could be like them.

The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy

Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as your change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

You can't build a house without nails and wood. 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.

Is the programming on such an ear-button receiver of a caliber to enable a man to be a gyroscope, both taking from and giving to society, beautifully balanced?

The televisor is real. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and it blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest,...' 'My wife says books aren't real.' 'Thank God for that. You can shut them and say, Hold on a moment. You play God to it...' 'It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason.

my aunt Neva was the guardian and gardener of the metaphors that became me. She saw to it that I was fed all the best fairy tales, poetry, cinema, and theater, so that I was continually in a fever about life and eager to write it all down.

You see? Granger turned to Montag. Grandfather's been dead for all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint.

How do you get so empty? Who takes it out of you?

Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? That gallant Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and closed the boozers at half past ten?

The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down.

In order to move others deeply we must deliberately allow ourselves to be carried away beyond the bounds of our normal sensibility

Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.

He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you.