“Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance” (Laurie Halse Anderson). Censorship has been a topic of controversy for thousands of years, with many people debating whether this censorship is good, protecting the public from various evils of the world we live in, or bad, stripping them of their right to learn different materials and express themselves in certain ways. Although there are many different opinions on this topic, the cons of censorship greatly outweigh the pros, because when you allow people to censor what you do and say, you allow them to reshape who you are, and with that, you aren’t contributing to the changes of society, you are letting society change you, which is also a recrudescing theme in Fahrenheit 451. …show more content…
After Montag steals a book from a woman’s house he and the other firemen were burning, Beatty appears at Montag’s house and voices the reasons for burning the books. “ … A book as a loaded gun… Burn it… Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin… Burn it…. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag” (58-59). This quote shows the rationale behind why the society drifted into the dystopian world they currently live in. When books were common, books were contentious, since every book offended at least one type of person, whether it be race, gender, habits, or any other way people could be identify themselves as. Censorship was a solution to this outrage over these detrimental stories. They banned all books to eradicate all possibility of controversy and any reason for people to be offended, which is the reason for the substance-lacking television that the mass populations watch. However, attempting to ban all books is not a positive way to deal with the problems. On the contrary, the banning of the books might have made the problems worse, since now the people who try to learn information are now considered criminals and are subjected to their house burning into ashes. Instead of attempting to fix the dilemma, they decide to ban all books, which is not an adequate solution to the problem, again showing that censorship is awful, and leads to a declining society. If people are not not able to learn and grow, they are not able to positively impact the world, leaving it to slowly spiral