Bertrand Russell Quotes
Citizens as conceived by governments are persons who admire the status quo and are prepared to exert themselves for its preservation. Oddly enough, while all governments aim at producing men of this type to the exclusion of all other types, their heroes in the past are of exactly the sort that they aim at preventing in the present. Americans admire George Washington and Jefferson, but imprison those who share their political opinions.
Russell, Bertrand. Education and the Social Order. George Allen & Unwin, 1932, p. 25.
President John Adams, once he became President, was greatly disturbed by the insults and attacks on him and his Federalist Party by many newspapers who preferred Thomas Jefferson and his view of democracy and freedom. Many of his supporters were also concerned about the new different immigrants that were coming to America in large numbers—–namely Roman Catholics. Adams and his Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts which not only worked against new immigrants but was the first major attempt at government censorship of the press in American History. Ironically, these laws—–a blight on American democratic history—–were finally repealed in large part due to the effort of Adams son, John Quincy Adams, who served int the House of Representatives after his presidency and had always been an inveterate foe of the laws that his father had instituted.
Actually it was Thomas Jefferson who had drafted most of the language. This attack was aimed at President John Adams, the big supporter of the unpopular Alien and Sedition laws, and the man Jefferson was intent on unseating at the end of his first term. He did and destroyed the Federalist Party in the process.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell OM FRS was a British polymath, philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, writer, social critic, political activist, and Nobel laureate. Bertrand Russell was one of the most influential and widely known intellectual figures of the twentieth century. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his extensive contributions to world literature and for his “rationality and humanity, as a fearless champion of free speech and free thought in the West.“
