From May 1717 to April 1718, Voltaire sat comfortably in…

“The Bastille, where I live, is best known as the site where the infamous prison was seized and ransacked by the masses, igniting the…

— David Lebovitz

“At the top of his file was a three-dimensional holograph scanned in from his military graduation. Cress preferred it to the infamous prison photo…

— Marissa Meyer

A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase…

— Mikhail Bakunin

“I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges, - astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc... It is very…

— Voltaire

“Life is thickly sown with thorns, and I know no other remedy than to pass quickly through them. The longer we dwell on our…

— Robyn Carr

“They could not help loving anything that made them laugh. The Lisbon earthquake was “embarrassing to the physicists and humiliating to theologians” (Barbier). It…

— Nancy Mitford

“Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad…

— Stendhal

O Voltaire! O humanity! O idiocy! There is something ticklish in "the truth," and in the SEARCH for the truth; and if man goes…

— Friedrich Nietzsche

“If God is always on the side of the big battalions as Voltaire says, then, let us not waste our time with little detachments!”

— Mehmet Murat ildan

Optimism and happiness are not the same thing, but they are becoming interchangeable, and it seemed to me that Voltaire's Candide gave me a…

— Mark Ravenhill

Priests, kings, statesmen, soldiers, bankers and public functionaries of all sorts; policemen, jailers and hangmen; capitalists, usurers, businessmen and property-owners; lawyers, economists and politicians…

— Mikhail Bakunin

“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…

— Pankaj Mishra

Voltaire made up his mind to destroy the superstition of his time. He fought with every weapon that genius could devise or use. He…

— Robert Green Ingersoll

Voltaire! A name that excites the admiration of men, the malignity of priests. Pronounce that name in the presence of a clergyman, and you…

— Robert Green Ingersoll

Voltaire was a smart cookie.

— John Perry