About saying certain things

Ladies and gentlemen, honored dignitaries, and especially you graduates, I come to you as an emissary from another time, when men and women were free to come and go as they pleased.

“You’re free to go” — I remember those halcyon days when this was so. If someone were to say, “How can you let someone say such things?” the most likely response would be a shrug and “It’s a free country.”

Voltaire was once quoted as saying — although the evidence is scant that he said this exactly — “I disappr...