Voltaire was the cleverest of all past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he surely was not.

He is by his opinions, and also by his middle-class origin, the natural leader of an implacable opposition.

Not a day goes by without our using the word optimism, coined by Voltaire against Leibniz, who had demonstrated (in spite of the Ecclesiastes and with the approval of the Church) that we live in the best of possible worlds. Voltaire, very reasonably, denied that exorbitant opinion... Leibniz could have replied that a world which has given us Voltaire has some right to be considered the best.

Voltaire, the greatest skeptic of his day, the materialist par excellence, shared Bailly's belief. He thought it quite likely that: Long before the empires of China and India, there had been nations cultured, learned, and powerful, which a deluge of barbarians overpowered and thus replunged into their primitive state of ignorance and savagery, or what they call the state of pure nature. Lettres sur l'Atlantide, p. 15. This conjecture is but a half-guess. There were such "deluges of barbarians" in the Fifth Race. With regard to the Fourth, it was a bonâ fide deluge of water which swept it away. Neither Voltaire nor Bailly, however, knew anything of the Secret Doctrine of the East. That which with Voltaire was the shrewd conjecture of a great intellect, was with Bailly a "question of historical facts."

Voltaire, the greatest of "infidels" of the eighteenth century, used to say, that if there were no God, people would have to invent one... Voltaire becomes, toward the end of his life, Pythagorical, and concludes by saying: "I have consumed forty years of my pilgrimage . . . seeking the philosopher's stone called truth. I have consulted all the adepts of antiquity, Epicurus and Augustine, Plato and Malebranche, and I still remain in ignorance. . . . All that I have been able to obtain by comparing and combining the system of Plato, of the tutor of Alexander, Pythagoras, and the Oriental, is this: Chance is a word void of sense. The world is arranged according to mathematical laws." ("Dictionnaire philosophique, 1764")

Mock on, mock on, Voltaire Rousseau;Mock on, mock on, 'tis all in vain!You throw the sand against the wind,And the wind blows it back again.

I grew bored in France -- and the main reason is that everyone here resembles Voltaire.

France is a nation with one religion and many sauces; England is a nation with many religions and only one sauce.

One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker.

To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?