Tweet [1]
… is from page 296 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 [2] – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the column [3] from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on May 31st, 2015):
The attack on free expression is sinister because it asserts that such freedom is not merely unwise but, in a sense, meaningless. Free speech is more comprehensively and aggressively embattled now than ever before in American history, largely because of two 19th-century ideas. One is that history – actually, History, a proper noun – has a mind of its own. The other is that most people do not really have minds of their own.