Author
French · 1694-1778 · 17 quotes
French · 1694–1778
17 quotes in our collection
Voltaire was the French Enlightenment philosopher, satirist, and polemicist who spent his career attacking religious intolerance, political tyranny, and intellectual obscurantism with a wit so devastating that the authorities kept putting him in the Bastille and he kept writing. Born François-Marie Arouet in Paris in 1694, he took the pen name Voltaire to signal a new identity. His short novel Candide — published in 1759, smuggled past censors, banned, and reprinted dozens of times — remains the most efficient demolition of optimistic theology available in any language. His enormous correspondence, his plays, his histories, and his campaign to rehabilitate the Protestant merchant Jean Calas, executed on false charges, made him the first modern public intellectual. When it is a question of money, everyone is of the same religion: the sentence that best measures the distance between official belief and actual behavior.
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