Voltaire - Men Quotes

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Men, generally going with the stream, seldom judge for themselves, and purity of taste is almost as rare as talent.

Voltaire
Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?

Voltaire
The malevolence of men revealed itself to his mind in all of its ugliness

Voltaire
Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.

Voltaire
Virtue between men is a commerce of good actions: he who has no part in this commerce must not be reckoned.

Voltaire
It is a serious question among them whether they [Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.

Voltaire
Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.

Voltaire
Men use thought only to justify their wrongdoings, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Voltaire
It is strange that thought should depend upon the stomach, and still that men with the best stomachs are not always the best thinkers.

Voltaire
He who is involved in ecstasies and visions, who takes dreams for reality, and his own imagination for prophesy, is a fanatical novice of great hope and promise, and will soon advance to the higher stage and kill men for the love of God.

Voltaire
All men are by nature free; you have therefore an undoubted liberty to depart whenever you please, but will have many and great difficulties to encounter in passing the frontiers.

Voltaire
It is with books as with men; a very small number play a great part; the rest are lost in the multitude.

Voltaire
It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Voltaire
Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.

Voltaire
The reasonable worship of a just God who punishes and rewards, would undoubtedly contribute to the happiness of men; but when that salutary knowledge of a just God is disfigured by absurd lies and dangerous superstitions, then the remedy turns to poison.

Voltaire
A single part of physics occupies the lives of many men, and often leaves them dying in uncertainty.

Voltaire
I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

Voltaire
Verses which do not teach men new and moving truths do not deserve to be read.

Voltaire
Money is always to be found when men are to be sent to the frontiers to be destroyed: when the object is to preserve them, it is no longer so.

Voltaire
Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.

Voltaire
Philosophers and men of letters have done more for mankind than Orpheus, Hercules, or Theseus; for it is more meritorious and more difficult to wean men from their prejudices than to civilize the barbarian: It is harder to correct than to instruct.

Voltaire
There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times.

Voltaire
[Men] use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Voltaire
What can you say to a man who tells you he prefers obeying God rather than men, and that as a result he's certain he'll go to heaven if he cuts your throat?

Voltaire
This is the happiest of all men, for he is superior to everything he possesses.

Voltaire
Satire lies about men of letters during their life, and eulogy after their death.

Voltaire
It is very strange that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels.

Voltaire
It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their colour.

Voltaire
It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?

Voltaire
Virtue supposes liberty, as the carrying of a burden supposes active force. Under coercion there is no virtue, and without virtue there is no religion. Make a slave of me, and I shall be no better for it. Even the sovereign has no right to use coercion to lead men to religion, which by its nature supposes choice and liberty. My thought is no more subject to authority than is sickness or health.

Voltaire