Here are 20 Voltaire quotes that create a lasting impression. It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too. Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities. If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. Voltaire Quotes Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Explore all famous quotations and sayings by Voltaire on Quotes.net. Those who can make you believe absurdities can. Help build the largest human-edited quotes.

Explore and Share Popular Voltaire Quotes, Sayings, Quotations, Slogans etc. Enjoy These Voltaire Quotes By Sharing With Your Friends, Relatives and Love One’s On Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, Gmail, etc. François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church.

Famous Voltaire Quotes

Ice-cream is exquisite – what a pity it isn’t illegal.

Love is a canvas furnished by nature and embroidered by imagination.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

A witty saying proves nothing.

All men are born with a nose and ten fingers, but no one was born with a knowledge of God.

All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.

All styles are good except the tiresome kind.

All the reasonings of men are not worth one sentiment of women.

An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.

Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices.

Anyone who seeks to destroy the passions instead of controlling them is trying to play the angel.

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Popular Voltaire Quotes

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

Better is the enemy of good.

Business is the salt of life.

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.

Chance is a word void of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.

Clever tyrants are never punished.

Common sense is not so common.

Divorce is probably of nearly the same date as marriage. I believe, however, that marriage is some weeks the more ancient.

Do well and you will have no need for ancestors.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

Each player must accept the cards life deals him or her: but once they are in hand, he or she alone must decide how to play the cards in order to win the game.

Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.

Every one goes astray, but the least imprudent are they who repent the soonest.

Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Fear follows crime and is its punishment.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.

Great Voltaire Quotes

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

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

He must be very ignorant for he answers every question he is asked.

He shines in the second rank, who is eclipsed in the first.

He was a great patriot, a humanitarian, a loyal friend; provided, of course, he really is dead.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.

He who is not just is severe, he who is not wise is sad.

History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes.

History should be written as philosophy.

How pleasant it is for a father to sit at his child’s board. It is like an aged man reclining under the shadow of an oak which he has planted.

I am very fond of truth, but not at all of martyrdom.

I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.

I hate women because they always know where things are.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders and man to be devoured by sorrow.

Quotes Voltaire Believe Absurdities

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

I should like to lie at your feet and die in your arms.

Also, Read Love Quotes

Also, Read life Quotes

“Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that famous quote, ordinarily attributed to Voltaire. When I brought up the quote on Twitter the other day, I was taken aback when a reader challenged its authenticity, citing this French-language Swiss source in which a Voltaire biographer writes it off as an internet myth. Had I, along with hundreds of others, gotten the origin of “absurdities . . . atrocities” wrong? Misattribution of famous quotes is rife online, after all, very much including the better-known line attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That most excellent maxim is best described as a paraphrase (rather than a translation) of the French philosopher’s views as rendered by English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906.

So I looked into the provenance of the “absurdities . . . atrocities” line, and here is what I found.

It appears to have originated as a loose translation of a passage from Voltaire’s ‘Questions sur les miracles’ (1765). The original is on the right page here, last paragraph, the one that begins “Il y a eu des gens qui ont dit autrefois. . .” The sentence in question is, “Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste.”

The English version—note that it differs slightly in wording from most internet versions—conventionally appears as part of the following longer paragraph translating the above [italics added]:

Formerly there were those who said: You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is injust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God-given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes of religion which have overrun the world.

Voltaire Quotes On Life

Which still leaves the question: where did the English translation come from? All sources I have seen attribute it to Norman Lewis Torrey, Les Philosophes: The Philosophers of the Enlightenment and Modern Democracy (1961).

Those Who Make You Believe Absurdities

While I am in no way a French scholar, I don’t see how the slightly longer version of the sentence associated with the Torrey volume misrepresents the somewhat more terse and aphoristic original. And it is the context of the full paragraph that explains why: the person who has been led into absurdity of belief is led to be unjust not in some incidental, random, or trivial way, but because he or she falls under a kind of external “command” or domination that results in a “demand to do wrong to that God-given sense of justice in your heart,” from which follow “crimes.”

In my view, the widely encountered internet quote does check out as very much what Voltaire was trying to warn us about in this passage. And as warnings go, this is one that remains timely at all places and times, including the United States as the year 2020 draws to a close.