Quotes About Voltaire

Voltaire made up his mind to destroy the superstition of his time. He fought with every weapon that genius could devise or use. He was the greatest of all caricaturists, and he used this wonderful gift without mercy.

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

In the days of Locke, Hume and Voltaire humanists argued that 'God is a product of the human imagination'. Dataism now gives humanists a taste of their own medicine, and tells them: 'Yes, God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is just the product of biochemical algorithms.

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

Candide was an optimist, but you're a pessoptimist. That fact, I repsonded, Is a virtue that, above all others, distinguishes my people. But you, he criticized again, seem to be imitating Candide. Don't blame me for that. Blame our way of life that hasn't changed since Voltaire's day, except that El Dorado has now come to exist on this planet.

Voltaire would mock the empire as "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire,

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

a phrase he attributed to Voltaire: "That calm courage in the midst of tumult, that serenity of a soul in danger, which is the greatest gift of nature for command." Gavin called it "the courage of two o'clock in the morning

The first, a quote from Voltaire, is contemptuous: "Anything too stupid to be spoken," he asserted, "is sung." The second, an adage from the advertising profession, is tactical: "If you can't make your case to an audience with facts, sing it to them.

For I showed men how they were the cause of their own unhappiness and, in consequence, how they might avoid it', writes Rousseau to Voltaire in his famous letter on the Lisbon disaster, laying the foundations of a new spirit that desacralizes nature, removing it from divine will and entrusting it to the hands of man.

From May 1717 to April 1718, Voltaire sat comfortably in the infamous prison insulting the Regent and reading Homer.

Despite hating mobs and technically being a nobleman, Napoleon welcomed the Revolution. At least in its early stages it accorded well with the Enlightenment ideals he had ingested from his reading of Rousseau and Voltaire.

While Voltaire lived, Frederick of Prussia told him, "After your death, there will be no one to replace you"; when the philosopher was gone, the king said, "For my part, I am consoled by having lived in the age of Voltaire.

Everyone knows the nature of colic," quipped Frederick of Prussia. "When a heavy drinker dies from colic, it teaches us to be sober," deadpanned Voltaire.

I have never played the lottery in my life and never will. Voltaire described lotteries as a tax on stupidity. More specifically, I think, on innumeracy.

Voltaire! A name that excites the admiration of men, the malignity of priests. Pronounce that name in the presence of a clergyman, and you will find that you have made a declaration of war.

Candide by Voltaire

Voltaire had once said that it was a good idea for a writer to live near an international frontier so that, if he angered powerful men, he could skip across the border and be safe. Voltaire

Earthquakes, I point out, have always made men eager to placate the gods. After the great Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755—that catastrophe which Voltaire saw as an irrefutable argument for the tragic view of life and against Leibnizian optimism—the locals decided on a propitiatory auto-da-fé.

Vain labour for me — vain labour almost for the grave English language — to do justice to the sparkling paradoxes that flew from lip to lip. The favourite theme was the superiority of the moderns to the ancients. Condorcet on this head was eloquent, and to some, at least, of his audience, most convincing. That Voltaire was greater than Homer few there were disposed to deny. Keen was the ridicule lavished on the dull pedantry which finds everything ancient necessarily sublime.

Voltaire abolished Christianity by believing in God.

Pangloss, he told me as he closed the book, was not as foolish as Voltaire had painted him.

He died shortly afterwards, at my house, swearing and always repeating that pain was an illusion, and that Pangloss, the slandered Pangloss, was not as foolish as Voltaire supposed.

It was, after all, Voltaire who was reputed to be the source of the famous quip that if God had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him, if only because, so long as his wife, his tailor, his lawyer, and his servants could be persuaded to believe in the threat of punishment in an afterlife, "I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often."49