Quote 7
"Off-hours, yes. But time to think? If you're not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can't think of anything else but the danger, then you're playing some game or sitting in some room where you can't argue with the fourwall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be, right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, ‘What nonsense!'" (2.131-4)
Check out what happens when Montag hits the river and has real pause to think, for the first time in the novel…
Quote 8
Fool, thought Montag to himself, you'll give it away. At the last fire, a book of fairy tales, he'd glanced at a single line. "I mean," he said, "in the old days, before homes were completely fireproofed–" Suddenly it seemed a much younger voice was speaking for him. He opened his mouth and it was Clarisse McClellan saying, "Didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going?" (1.309)
Montag escapes the guilt of betraying his duty by ascribing his actions to other things: in this case, to another person (Clarisse).
Quote 9
Montag swallowed. "Its calculators can be set to any combination, so many amino acids, so much sulphur, so much butterfat and alkaline. Right?"
"We all know that."
"All of those chemical balances and percentages on all of us here in the house are recorded in the master file downstairs. It would be easy for someone to set up a partial combination on the Hound's ‘memory,’ a touch of amino acids, perhaps. That would account for what the animal did just now. Reacted toward me." (1.228-30)
This is an interesting passage as it raises the question: how do we define identity and being? If it’s all just chemical in the end, what is the difference between a Mechanical Hound and a real one? What’s to stop a piece of technology from experiencing "human" emotions?