59 quotes
Whatever else he was during his life, he was never dull, and the world forgives almost anything but stupidity.
Voltaire (1916)
The truth is always modern and there never comes a time when it is safe to give it voice.
Voltaire (1916)
Hell, that's why they make erasers.
Some of you say religion makes people happy. So does laughing gas. So does whiskey.
We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States, and you know it, and that is all.
Valiantly he fought on every intellectual battlefield.
Voltaire (1916)
I am an agnostic as to the question of God.
Why I Am An Agnostic (1929)
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history.
Peter's Quotations: Ideas For Our Time (1977)
No iconoclast can possibly escape the severest criticism.
Voltaire (1916)
The usual is always mediocre. When nature takes it into her head to make a man, she fits him with her own equipment and educates him in her own school.
Voltaire (1916)
What we know as moral forces are even more important than guns and battleships. These forces would constantly grow stronger if nations relied upon them and cultivated them instead of the munitions of warfare.
To disband the armies and destroy the forts, to diffuse love and brotherhood, and peace and justice in the place of war and strife, could tend only to the building up of character, the elevation of the soul, and the strength and well-being of the state.
Resist Not Evil (1904)
This great senseless, wasteful, cruel spawning of life upon the earth! I see not only its pain, but its pleasures, and its joys annoy me more than its sorrows, for I don't want to lose them.
The nation that would to-day disarm its soldiers and turn its people to the paths of peace would accomplish more to its building up than by all the war taxes wrung from its hostile and unwilling serfs.
Resist Not Evil (1904)
Ancestors do not mean so much. The rebel who succeeds generally makes it easier for the posterity that follows him; so these descendants are usually contented and smug and soft. Rebels are made from life, not ancestors.
I feel as I always have, that the earth is the home and the only home of man, and I am convinced that whatever he is to get out of his existence he must get while he is here.
a eulogy for Darrow by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1938)
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.
Voltaire (1916)
Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought — even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.
Resist Not Evil (1904)
I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
a eulogy for Darrow by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1938)