great WYSIWYG editors out there for your web pages http://www.tinymce.com/

gistfile1.txt

<script src="../Scripts/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/tiny_mce.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<textarea id="textarea_text" rows="20" cols="20" runat="server" class="tinymce" />

tinyMCE.init({
    mode: "specific_textareas",
    editor_selector: "tinymce",
    encoding: "xml",
    height: "600",
    width: "100%",
    theme: "advanced",
    plugins: "autolink,lists,pagebreak,style,layer,table,save,advhr,advimage,advlink,emotions,iespell,inlinepopups,insertdatetime,preview,searchreplace,print,contextmenu,paste,directionality,fullscreen,noneditable,visualchars,nonbreaking,xhtmlxtras",
    theme_advanced_buttons1: "newdocument,|,bold,italic,underline,strikethrough,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull,|,formatselect,fontselect,fontsizeselect,forecolor,backcolor",
    theme_advanced_buttons2: "cut,copy,paste,pastetext,|,search,replace,|,bullist,numlist,|,outdent,indent,blockquote,|,undo,redo,|,link,unlink,anchor,image,|,insertdate,inserttime",
    theme_advanced_buttons3: "tablecontrols,|,hr,removeformat,visualaid,|,sub,sup,|,charmap,emotions,advhr",
    theme_advanced_buttons4: "insertlayer,moveforward,movebackward,absolute,|,spellchecker,|,cite,abbr,acronym,del,ins,attribs,|,visualchars,nonbreaking,blockquote,pagebreak,|,print,|,ltr,rtl,|,fullscreen,preview",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_location: "top",
    theme_advanced_toolbar_align: "left",
    theme_advanced_statusbar_location: "bottom",
    theme_advanced_resizing: true,
    setup: function (ed) {
        ed.onSaveContent.add(function (i, o) {
            o.content = o.content.replace(/&#39/g, "&apos");
        });
    }
});

And finally, notice the 
encoding: xml
initialization code in the constructor. Take care of the encoding piece should you wish. I’d recommend this vs. disabling any kind of validation to help protect yourself a little bit more from XSS attacks or things of that nature. If you do, you need to decode it to display it properly.

pseudo code:
textarea_text.Value = HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(theEncodedTextFromDBOrWherever)