“For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws.”
Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Coda (1979)
Context: For it is a mad world and it will get madder if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics. The real world is the playing ground for each and every group, to make or unmake laws. But the tip of the nose of my book or stories or poems is where their rights end and my territorial imperatives begin, run and rule. If Mormons do not like my plays, let them write their own. If the Irish hate my Dublin stories, let them rent typewriters. 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.
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Ray Bradbury 401
American writer 1920–2012Related quotes
Quoted in Alyssa Kim, "Kucinich Campaigns for Peace" (August 12, 2007). Kucinich was speaking on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, ABC News (August 12, 2007)
“It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.”
Source: Angela's Ashes (1996)
On Orson Welles, as quoted in The New York Times (11 October 1985)
“A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two.”
Jacula Prudentum (1651)
“The Dwarf sees farther than the Giant, when he has the Giant's shoulders to mount on.”
The Friend; A Series of Essays (1812), No. 15 (30 November 1809), p. 228
Cf. Isaac Newton, letter to Robert Hooke (15 February 1676): "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants".
Paris.
A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)