In today’s day and age, beliefs that people don’t agree with are often covered and hidden from people to avoid hearing something they may disagree with, or find upsetting. We have banned book lists in schools, and news stations give their biased opinions by concealing what people who disagree with them have to say. I believe that censorship is a bad thing, and it limits peoples’ ability to form their own opinions about what they are seeing. “Without libraries, what have we? We have no past and no future.” This is a quote from the writer Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and more. A common theme or plot-point within multiple of Bradbury’s works is the idea of book burning, wherein certain ideas or beliefs are outlawed …show more content…
However, even if we are shocked and appalled by these events, we must learn from our mistakes, not try to forget them. When we censor even the most deplorable actions and opinions, we will eventually have no one who knows why they are wrong, or what is right and wrong. I think that this quote by Ray Bradbury, and many of his other beliefs on the subject, are very relevant today. We in the modern era often find ourselves conflicted with what is and isn’t okay to teach in schools, write in books, and let people say it at all. Where we often slip is when we decide that certain controversial beliefs are wrong to hold, and especially when we decide that some should be outright illegal, or give others or the government the ability to control what we see and say. Ray Bradbury has long struggled against his producers and the public to avoid censorship in his works, and a common theme in multiple of his novels is book burning, wherein some ideas become outlawed, and even books expressing those opinions are to be destroyed, such is the plot of his famous book Fahrenheit 451, and as seen in part one chapter of another book of his, The Martian