But you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last.

Bradbury’s line expresses a recurring theme in his work: the limits of persuasion in a complacent or distracted society. The speaker recognizes that warnings—about censorship, violence, technological numbing, or cultural decay—cannot be forced into people’s minds by argument alone. Change often arrives only after consequences become undeniable, when ordinary life is disrupted and people are compelled to ask what went wrong. The closing “It can’t last” carries both prophecy and moral insistence: a society built on denial and suppression is unstable, and the reckoning is inevitable. The quote thus frames catastrophe as a grim teacher and underscores Bradbury’s belief in awakening through lived experience rather than lecturing.