All of this has happened before and it will happen again
Montag jammed his Seashell to his ear.
"Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows. The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house. Ready!"
Of course! Why hadn't they done it before! Why, in all the years, hadn't this game been tried! Everyone up, everyone out! He couldn't be missed! The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!
"At the count of ten now! One! Two!"
He felt the city rise. Three . He felt the city turn to its thousands of doors. Faster! Leg up, leg down!
"Four!"
The people sleepwalking in their hallways.
"Five! "
He felt their hands on the doorknobs! The smell of the river was cool and like a solid rain. His throat was burnt rust and his eyes were wept dry with running. He yelled as if this yell would jet him on, fling him the last hundred yards.
"Six, seven, eight !"
The doorknobs turned on five thousand doors.
"Nine!"
He ran out away from the last row of houses, on a slope leading down to a solid moving blackness.
"Ten!"
The doors opened. He imagined thousands on thousands of faces peering into yards, into alleys, and into the sky, faces hid by curtains, pale, night-frightened faces, like grey animals peering from electric caves, faces with grey colourless eyes, grey tongues and grey thoughts looking out through the numb flesh of the face.
-- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)