Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

Bradbury frames libraries as civilization’s collective memory and its engine of continuity. “No past” suggests that without preserved books and records, a culture loses access to its accumulated experience—history, art, science, and the cautionary lessons that prevent repetition of old errors. “No future” extends the idea: without that stored knowledge, imagination and progress are stunted, because new work is built from what has been saved, studied, and argued over. The line also echoes Bradbury’s lifelong anti-censorship stance (famously dramatized in *Fahrenheit 451*), treating the destruction or neglect of libraries as a form of cultural amnesia that collapses both identity and possibility.