Ray Bradbury Quotes

One should never underestimate the power of books.

I thought that words and books and pens were more powerful than guns.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

Let us pick up our books and our pens, they are the most powerful weapons.

Cripes Miss Wilcox, they're not guns,' I said. No, they're not Mattie, they're books. And a hundred times more dangerous.

Men of power have no time to read; yet the men who do not read are unfit for power.

I believe in the power of ideas, I believe in the power of books, but you have to give them time.

The rules have changed. True power is held by the person who possesses the largest bookshelf, not gun cabinet or wallet.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

Books still accomplish miracles; they persuade men.

Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.

Freedmen have the natural thirst for knowledge, aspire to power and influence… coupled with learning, and are excited by the special study of books.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

Nay, it's not the Devil been leading her astray. It's books! That girl has been nothing but trouble ever since she learned how to read.

The greatest threat to extremism isn't drones firing missiles, but girls reading books.

When you publish a book, you do so in part to end the silence. All censorship is silence. I would never, as an author, feel right requiring a young person whose family would object to the book to read it. Just as I would never force that person to read it, I would ask those folks to not force others not to read it. To me, that is just good manners.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

Where books are burned in the end people will be burned too.

[On libraries] What's great about them is that anybody can go into them and find a book and borrow it free of charge and read it. They don't have to steal it from a bookshop... You know when you're young, you're growing up, they're almost sexually exciting places because books are powerhouses of knowledge, and therefore they're kind of slightly dark and dangerous. You see books that kind of make you go 'Oh!'

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Books have always been important to me - my mom was a first grade teacher, so I grew up reading all the time.