Quotes about Voltaire

58 Sourced Quotes

Rousseau's ideas were in the air; he only expressed what many of his contemporaries knew, namely that they were faced with a choice and had to decide either for Voltairianism, with its reasonableness and respectability, or for the surrender of historical traditions and a completely new beginning. There is no personal relationship in the whole history of European culture with more profound symbolic significance than that between Voltaire and Rousseau.

It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame.

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

I praise the Frenchman [Voltaire], his remark was shrewd —
How sweet, how passing sweet, is solitude!
But grant me still a friend in my retreat
Whom I may whisper — solitude is sweet.

Had the modern professors of eugenics had power in France in 1694, they probably would not have permitted such a child to have been born. Their scientific knowledge would have shown conclusively that no person of value could have come from the union of his father and mother. In those days, nature had not been instructed by the professors of eugenics and so Voltaire was born.

Clarence Darrow

Hyper-selectionism has been with us for a long time in various guises; for it represents the late nineteenth century's scientific version of the myth of natural harmony—all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds (all structures well designed for a definite purpose in this case). It is, indeed, the vision of foolish Dr. Pangloss, so vividly satirized by Voltaire in Candide—the world is not necessarily good, but it is the best we could possibly have.

Stephen Jay Gould

Voltaire inscribed on a statue of Love: "Whoever thou art, behold thy master! He rules thee, or has ruled thee, or will rule thee!"

Alain-René Lesage

There are, and always have been, destructive pseudo-scientific notions linked to race and religion; these are the most widespread and damaging. Hopefully, educated people can succeed in shedding light into these areas of prejudice and ignorance, for as Voltaire once said: "Men will commit atrocities as long as they believe absurdities."

The French philosophy of the eighteenth century was in full strength. Those were the years in which Voltaire ruled European opinion, and Turgot could not but take account of his influence. Yet no one could apparently be more unlike those who were especially named as the French philosophers of the eighteenth century. He remained reverential; he was never blasphemous, never blatant; he was careful to avoid giving needless pain or arousing fruitless discussion; and, while the tendency of his whole thinking was evidently removing him from the orthodoxy of the Church, his was a broader and deeper philosophy than that which was then dominant.

Andrew Dickson White

Even Voltaire's father could not make a lawyer out of a genius. To be a good lawyer, one must have a mind and a disposition to venerate the past; a respect for precedents; a belief in the wisdom and the sanctity of the dead. Voltaire had genius, imagination, feeling, and poetry, and these gifts always have been, and always will be, incompatible with the practice of law.

Clarence Darrow

Voltaire was not the first or last man to convert a prison into a hall of fame. A prison is confining to the body, but whether it affects the mind, depends entirely upon the mind.
It was while in prison that he changed his name from the one his father gave him — Arouet — to the one he has made famous throughout all time — Voltaire. He said, "I was very unlucky under my first name. I want to see if this one will succeed any better."

Clarence Darrow

In Geneva lived Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He too was a rebel, mighty in war. Voltaire was keener, wittier, deeper, greater. Rousseau was more fiery, emotional, passionate. Both were really warriors in the same great cause. From their different places, three miles apart, both sent forth their thunderbolts to wake a sleeping world. When the world awakened and shook itself, churches, thrones, institutions, laws, and customs were buried in the wreck. Some charged the wreck to Voltaire, some to Rousseau.

Clarence Darrow

The age-long history of thinking on gravitation, too, was erased from the collective consciousness, and that force somehow became the serendipitous child of Newton's genius. The new attitude is well illustrated by the anecdote of the apple, a legend spread by Voltaire, one of the most active and vehement erasers of the past. … The need to build the myth of an ex nihilo creation of modern science gave rise to much impassioned rhetoric.

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

It was this savagery and madness which darkened the understanding of the most prominent representatives of the culture of all nations, such as Cicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Mohamed, Martin Luther, Giordano Bruno, Frederick the Great, Voltaire, Josef II, Napoleon I, Goethe, Herder, Immanuel Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Charles Fournier, Ludwig Feuerbach, Richard Wagner, Bismarck, Rudolf Virchow, Theodor Billroth, Eugen Duhring - and countless others in all fields to come out against the Jews. Savagery and madness, finally, explains the anti-Semitism of the most distinguished representatives of our culture, such as Simion Barnutiu, B. P. Hajdau, Vasile Alecsandri, Vasile Conta, Mihail Eminescu.

Of women he [Voltaire] has no very high opinion. To judge from his treatment of them, their minds are exclusively occupied by the prospect of making love to handsome young men with good figures, though, being both venal and timid, they are prepared to hire their bodies to old inquisitors or soldiers if, by so doing, they can save their own lives or amass riches. They are inconstant, and will gladly cut off the nose of a husband fondly mourned in order to cure a new lover.

Let us be honest. Did all the priests of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much as Bruno? Did all the priests of France do as great a work for the civilization of the world as Diderot and Voltaire? Did all the ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of human knowledge as David Hume? Have all the clergymen, monks, friars, ministers, priests, bishops, cardinals and popes, from the day of Pentecost to the last election, done as much for human liberty as Thomas Paine? — as much for science as Charles Darwin?

Robert G. Ingersoll

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.

The contrast between Tolstoy's discretion and Dostoevsky's exhibitionism, between the restraint of the one and the 'dancing about naked in public' of the other—as someone says in The Possessed—is attributable to the same social gap as separated Voltaire from Rousseau.

What is so endearing about the young French Canadians revolting against their tradition is that they sometimes write as if Voltaire's Candide had come off the press last week instead of two hundred years ago.

Pensions are the favors of the powerful, and dangerous to any great intellect. It is only here and there down throughout the ages that a Voltaire is born who does not fall a victim to their blandishments.

Clarence Darrow

My wife says I had a nervous breakdown during the writing of Mefisto. Maybe I did, but what's a nervous breakdown for a writer? For a writer every day is a nervous breakdown. [...] The book came out in the spring, and I remember I spent that following summer digging my garden — Voltaire would have been proud. I made a wonderful garden. Grew beans, lettuces. I was healing myself from some kind of traumatic process that I don't pretend to understand. All right, let's agree with my wife and call it a nervous breakdown.

The take-home message is that we should blame religion itself, not religious extremism - as though that were some kind of terrible perversion of real, decent religion. Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.' So did Bertrand Russell: 'Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

Richard Dawkins

There are two things that kill a genius — a fatal disease and contentment. When a man is contented he goes to sleep. Voltaire had no chance to be contented, and so he wrote eternally and unceasingly, more than any other man in the history of the world.

Clarence Darrow

I expressed just now my mistrust of what is called Spiritualism —... I owe it a trifle for a message said to come from Voltaire's Ghost. It was asked, Are you not now convinced of another world? and rapped out, There is no other world — Death is only an incident in Life.

William De Morgan

I know where there is more wisdom than is found in Napoleon, Voltaire, or all the ministers present and to come — in public opinion.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord