Quote 1
"What traitors books can be! You think they’re backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives." (2.386)
Beatty misses the point. The reason books are valuable is because they are contradictory, conflicted, and confusing. It means that the reader can – or has to – think for himself, as Montag so desperately wants to himself.
Quote 2
"Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him. And wasn't it this bright boy you selected for beatings and tortures after hours? Of course it was. We must all be alike. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against. So! A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man's mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? Me? I won't stomach them for a minute." (1.614)
Beatty cites many different reasons for the abolishment of books, but this one is perhaps the most terrifying. Fear and jealousy imagine intellectualism as a weapon. Bradbury reminds us that those who can not fight with words or ideas use violence as a substitute.
Quote 3
"Here or there, that's bound to occur. Clarisse McClellan? We've a record on her family. We've watched them carefully. Heredity and environment are funny things. You can't rid yourselves of all the odd ducks in just a few years. The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle." (1.624)
The existence of people like Clarisse McClellan – or even like Guy Montag – makes Fahrenheit 451 an optimistic novel. It’s that whole "the human spirit prevails" thing.
Quote 4
"It was pretty silly, quoting poetry around free and easy like that. It was the act of a silly damn snob. Give a man a few lines of verse and he thinks he's the Lord of all Creation. You think you can walk on water with your books. Well, the world can get by just fine without them. Look where they got you, in slime up to your lip. If I stir the slime with my little finger, you'll drown!" (3.38)
It’s odd that Beatty makes so many religious references (like walking on water), given that the Bible is a banned book…
Quote 5
"What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?" Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. "It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And fire will lift you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical." (3.20)
Fire should be an element of the natural world, but it has been appropriated by man for solely destructive purposes.