Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame.”

— Ray Bradbury

202. “I have something to fight for and live for; that makes me a better killer. I’ve got what amounts to a religion, now .”

— Ray Bradbury

203. “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

204. “So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.”

— Ray Bradbury

205. “The problem in our country isn’t with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

— Ray Bradbury

206. “The gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.”

— Ray Bradbury

207. “The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive, and the ability to fantasize is the ability to grow.”

— Ray Bradbury

208. “You can write a short story in two hours. Two hours a day, you have a novel in a year.”

— Ray Bradbury

209. “My stories are warnings; they’re not predictions. If they were predictions, I wouldn’t do them. Because then I’d be part of the doom-ridden psychology. But every time I name a problem, I try to give a solution.”

— Ray Bradbury

210. “Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.”

— Ray Bradbury

211. “If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don’t.”

— Ray Bradbury

212. “It could reach up and grab the moon.”

— Ray Bradbury

213. “But souls can’t be sold. They can only be lost and never found again.”

— Ray Bradbury

214. “You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.”

— Ray Bradbury

215. “You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.”

— Ray Bradbury

216. “One thing people sometimes forget about Fahrenheit 451 is that the government doesn’t begin by burning books – it’s ordinary people who turn away from reading and the habits of thought and reflection it encourages. When the government starts actively censoring information, most people don’t even bat an eye. How important is reading to the health of a democracy like ours?”

— Ray Bradbury

217. “When you reach the stars, boy, yes, and live there forever, all the fears will go, and Death himself will die.”

— Ray Bradbury

218. “By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.”

— Ray Bradbury

219. “The father hesitated only a moment. He felt the vague pain in his chest. If I run, he thought, what will happen? Is Death important? No. Everything that happens before Death is what counts. And we’ve done fine tonight. Even Death can’t spoil it.”

— Ray Bradbury

220. “Get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it.”

— Ray Bradbury

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

221. “Debes mantenerte borracho de literatura para que la realidad no pueda destruirte.”

— Ray Bradbury

222. “I love the musical form of books. It’s a different way of doing things, it’s very beautiful. You’re able to sing things instead of saying them. So what the heck – why not do them?”

— Ray Bradbury

Featured in: Book Quotes

223. “You’ve been put on the world to love the act of being alive.”

— Ray Bradbury

224. “Life should be touched, not strangled.”

— Ray Bradbury

225. “The terrible tyranny of the majority.”

— Ray Bradbury

226. “I don’t have a computer. A computer’s a typewriter. I already have a typewriter.”

— Ray Bradbury

227. “If teachers and grammar school editors find my jawbreaker sentences shatter their mushmilk teeth, let them eat stale cake dunked in weak tea of their own ungodly manufacture.”

— Ray Bradbury

228. “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?”

— Ray Bradbury

229. “If someone sends you a love letter you’ve got to answer back.”

— Ray Bradbury

230. “We must move into the universe. Mankind must save itself. We must escape the danger of war and politics. We must become astronauts and go out into the universe and discover the God in ourselves.”

— Ray Bradbury

231. “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” someone said.”

— Ray Bradbury

232. “We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing.”

— Ray Bradbury

233. “We are living in a time when flowers are trying to live on flowers, instead of on good rain and black loam.”

— Ray Bradbury

234. “First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”

— Ray Bradbury

235. “Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else.”

— Ray Bradbury

236. “Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them.”

— Ray Bradbury

237. “People don’t talk about anything... No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else.”

— Ray Bradbury

238. “He says I’m a regular onion! I keep him busy peeling away the layers.”

— Ray Bradbury

239. “The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”

— Ray Bradbury

240. “There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.”

— Ray Bradbury

241. “To solve the drug problem, we have to start at the root – first grade. If a boy has all the toys in his head that reading can give him, and you hook him into science fiction, then you’ve got the future secured.”

— Ray Bradbury

Featured in: Reading Quotes

242. “There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and crystal prisms.”

— Ray Bradbury

243. “The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.”

— Ray Bradbury

Featured in: Book Quotes

244. “The automobile is the most dangerous weapon in our society – cars kill more than wars do.”

— Ray Bradbury

245. “Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and 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, ‘What nonsense!”

— Ray Bradbury

246. “I don’t know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren’t happy. Something’s missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I’d burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”

— Ray Bradbury

247. “The stars are yours, if you have the head, the hands, and the heart for them.”

— Ray Bradbury

248. “I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough, it’ll make sense.”

— Ray Bradbury

249. “I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.”

— Ray Bradbury

250. “I don’t try to describe the future. I try to prevent it.”

— Ray Bradbury