Voltaire Quotes - Page 3

"It is far better to be silent than merely to increase the quantity of bad books."
-Voltaire

"[Optimism is] the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst."
-Voltaire

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-Voltaire in Death quotes.

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong."
-Voltaire

"It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets."
-Voltaire

"I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas."
-Voltaire in Life quotes.

"It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue."
-Voltaire in Mind quotes.

"You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books."
-Voltaire in Pleasure quotes.

"God is always on the side of the big battalions."
-Voltaire

"Love truth, and pardon error."
-Voltaire in Truth quotes.

"He is a hard man who is only just, and a sad one who is only wise."
-Voltaire

"It is better to risk saving a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one."
-Voltaire in Risk quotes.

"Once the people begin to reason, all is lost."
-Voltaire in People quotes.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
-Voltaire in Belief quotes.

"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 color."
-Voltaire in Chastity quotes.

"Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes."
-Voltaire in History quotes.

"Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination."
-Voltaire in Nature quotes.

"This poem will never reach its destination."
-Voltaire

"There is a wide difference between speaking to deceive, and being silent to be impenetrable."
-Voltaire in Silence quotes.

"Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference."
-Voltaire in Equality quotes.

"It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
-Voltaire in Government quotes.

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts."
-Voltaire in Words quotes.

"The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination."
-Voltaire in Government quotes.

"Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less in human beings of whom they know nothing."
-Voltaire

"The public is a ferocious beast - one must either chain it up or flee from it."
-Voltaire

"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it."
-Voltaire

"Life resembles the banquet of Damocles; the sword is ever suspended."
-Voltaire