Top 500 Ray Bradbury Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Life should be touched, not strangled.”

— Ray Bradbury

202. “Surprise is where creativity comes in.”

— Ray Bradbury

203. “Everything is generated through your own will power.”

— Ray Bradbury

204. “I’m interested in having fun with ideas, throwing them up in the air like confetti and then running under them.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

206. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

208. “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

209. “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

210. “Don’t ever be a Rocket Man.” I stopped. “I mean it,” he said. “Because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

214. “They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

217. “I hate all politics. I don’t like either political party. One should not belong to them – one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.”

— Ray Bradbury

218. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

220. “A good night sleep, or a ten minute bawl, or a pint of chocolate ice cream, or all three together, is good medicine.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

222. “Thinking little at all about nothing in particular.”

— Ray Bradbury

223. “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

224. “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

225. “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

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

231. “Those who don’t build must burn.”

— Ray Bradbury

232. “When a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.”

— Ray Bradbury

233. “I’m not really dying today. No person ever died that had a family. I’ll be around a long time. A thousand years from now, a whole township of my offspring will be biting sour apples in the gumwood shade.”

— Ray Bradbury

234. “We’re all watching each other, so there’s no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.”

— Ray Bradbury

235. “Evil has only the power that we give it. I give you nothing. I take back. Starve. Starve. Starve.”

— Ray Bradbury

236. “To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.”

— Ray Bradbury

237. “Every day is Christmas Day to a dog.”

— Ray Bradbury

238. “We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.”

— Ray Bradbury

239. “War is a bad thing, but peace can be a living horror.”

— Ray Bradbury

240. “Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don’t need to read it. They are the future.”

— Ray Bradbury

241. “You’ve got to love libraries. You’ve got to love books. You’ve got to love poetry. You’ve got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it.”

— Ray Bradbury

242. “Putting out the stars and extinguishing the sun.”

— Ray Bradbury

243. “Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.”

— Ray Bradbury

244. “Nobody listens anymore. I can’t talk to the walls because they’re yelling at me, I can’t talk to my wife; she listens to the walls. I just want someone to hear what I have to say. And maybe if I talk long enough it’ll make sense. And I want you to teach me to understand what I read.”

— Ray Bradbury

245. “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

246. “Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.”

— Ray Bradbury

247. “Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.”

— Ray Bradbury

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

— Ray Bradbury

249. “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

250. “We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe.”

— Ray Bradbury