Fahrenheit 451 Quote Analysis

Fahrenheit 451
Knowledge is not power, it is illegal, it must be burned, or as least that’s how it is in a world where society does not understand the power of knowledge. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel set in the future where the society is corrupted. Montag, a fireman whose job is to start a fires and burn books, has just came back from work one day, when he met his neighbor, Clarisse; Montag and Clarisse had a conversation during their trip home. Clarisse told him about her life, how everybody thinks she’s strange and antisocial. At the end, Clarisse asked Montag, “Are you happy”? Of which Montag responded with “Of course I’m happy. What does she think? I’m not”? That same night, Montag’s found his wife, Mildred, laying on her bed with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hands. Montag immediately called for doctors, but instead of doctors, two operators with a machine showed up at his door, where they replaced all of Mildred’s blood. After this event, Montag became more and more disgusted with his life. He began to secretly look and read through books which he had been stealing from the houses he’d been ordered to burn down, and this is where Montag began to realize the power of knowledge.

In the society of Fahrenheit 451, books are illegal because they contain ideas and knowledge, which is a threat to the government.

The government believes it is much easier to control a society full of dumb people, so they put up an law to restrict books from the public. “We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the constitution says, but everyone made equal... A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind”. Books are dangerous, not because they physically are, but because of the knowledge they contain can bring about any opponent. Ideas and knowledge makes people question how things are, and allows them to see all the problems within this corrupted

society.
If knowledge is taken away from people, they will become no more than just machines. “It doesn’t think anything we don’t want it to think” The mechanical hound is programmed to function as a hound, but it is not alive, it is only a machine. But in this society, people are alive but they do not think and act differently than anyone else, they have no original thoughts, they only think and do what TV shows tells them to think and do. The government manipulates this fact by affecting the TV shows they watch, so they all think of the same things, they all do the same things, they all are just machines that operates in benefit of the government.
It is quite scary to consider a society like this in our world, but we might not be too far off. The technology is already enough to build virtual reality devices, people are neglecting books as if they aren’t important, more and more people would rather enjoy the consumption of entertainment products instead of conversing with people in real life. These all match the possibility of the society in Fahrenheit 451. If the government fears our ideas and knowledge, we must not let our society shift in this direction. Knowledge is power, and in our current times, we have infinite access to it, we should all appreciate that.