Quotes About Voltaire

One does not arrest Voltaire.

My brother maintains," I answered, "that those who wish to look carefully at the earth should stay at the necessary distance," and Voltaire very much admired the answer.

Hast thou found out, Voltaire, that it is bliss to die, And does thy hideous smile over thy bleached bones fly?

Unfortunately we did not attend Voltaire's dictum to define our terms before we began. The result was disagreement on all issues.

The supposed right of intolerance is absurd and barbaric. It is the right of the tiger; nay, it is far worse, for tigers do but tear in order to have food, while we rend each other for paragraphs.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend - provided, of course, that he really is dead.

Self-love is the instrument of our preservation.

As she stared at Voltaire's still and peaceful expression – that total absence of pain – there was an inescapable feeling brewing in the darkness. Envy.

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that, if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.

What! A ferocious animal has sucked the blood of my family. I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, What shall we put in its place!" Voltaire's

Voltaire was soon turned, with Catherine's encouragement, into a patron saint for the secular Russian aristocracy. Voltairianism, vaguely signifying rationalism, scepticism and reformism, became her official ideology. Almost all of Voltaire was translated into Russian; no library was deemed complete if it did not contain a collection of Voltaire's works in the original French.

Rousseau alienated his aristocratic patrons; he quarrelled with most of his friends and well-wishers, including Hume and Diderot, many of whom also ended up deriding him as a madman. But he disagreed most violently – and productively – with Voltaire.