Potter Stewart, a man of wisdom, expresses that “Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself” (Potter Stewart). This idea that censorship shows a society’s lack of confidence hold true for Guy Montag’s society. The government has placed a law that prohibits the reading and owning of all books. The government is afraid of people obtaining knowledge of better times and gaining hope of a better life. Fear for knowledge has driven this dystopian society to censor information, and many examples are apparent throughout the novel and recently in the real world.
The struggle to have a society of conformity and similar beings has driven the government to place laws that censor information. Beatty explains the horrifying truth of their society, "…show more content… Not everyone made equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. Each man the image of every other" (Bradbury 55). They censor information to achieve the conformity that they strive for every day. The censorship continues onto the items that they are able to possess. Owning a book is a criminal offense punishable by time in an asylum. Books are compared to a "loaded gun in the house next door" (Bradbury 56). Books are being compared to a loaded gun because they believe a man with superior knowledge is a threat to other members of society. If all men do not have equal intelligence, it is believed that they rise above inferior citizens and corrupt the way society works. Books also must be burned to please the masses. Society was not always prohibited from reading books, in the past of this society books were accepted and commonly read. Their society got to this point because people didn't want to read an entire book in order to know what it was about. Books started to be shortened until just the main ideas were summarized in a couple of
