Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 381 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of his columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn was originally published in the Washington Post on April 25th, 2018) (original emphasis):

So, the [United States Holocaust Memorial] museum presents human nature’s noblest as well as vilest manifestations. It has received 43 million visitors, 90 percent non-Jewish, many of whom have had opportunities to talk to survivors, such as Fanny Aizenberg, who in her 102nd year still comes most Sundays. Located just off the Mall, one of the world’s most pleasant urban spaces and the epicenter of American politics, the museum inflicts an assaultive, excruciating knowing: Nothing – nothing – is unthinkable, and political institutions by themselves provide no permanent safety from barbarism, which permanently lurks beneath civilization’s thin, brittle crust.