Ray Bradbury wrote about the dangers of censorship in this book, and his replies to his critics and editors of his work demonstrates just how deeply his passion ran.
The "Critical Overview" section in the links below has a number of strong quotes supporting the idea that Bradbury's primary goal was to make his readers aware of how culture without literature eventually loses everything that makes it humane.
Bradbury himself wrote in his 1979 Coda:
...Every story, slederized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like--in the finale--Edgar Guest...Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?
...The point in obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches...
The thing that makes Fahrenheit 451 so relevant today is that things haven't changed. People are still running about with lit matches looking for ways to burn books by dumbing down the literature and filling American minds with stuff and nonsense.
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