France, 1694–1778
Voltaire
French Enlightenment satirist and crusader for civil liberty. Candide remains a masterwork of philosophical wit.
Voltaire in 15 lines
Every Voltaire passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
“Common sense is not so common.”
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”
“The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
“If I had had more time, this letter would have been shorter.”
“If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism, if there were two they would cut each other's throats, but there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness.”
“If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?”
“Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.”
“In every province, the chief occupations, in order of importance, are lovemaking, malicious gossip, and talking nonsense.”
“Let us work without reasoning, said Martin; it is the only way to make life endurable.”
“Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.”
“Fools admire everything in an author of reputation.”
“Optimism, said Cacambo, What is that? Alas! replied Candide, It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst!”
“A false science makes atheists, a true science prostrates men before the Deity”
“Religion may be purified. This great work was begun two hundred years ago: but men can only bear light to come in upon them by degrees.”
Where Voltaire lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Public life feels ugly, exhausting, and still important.
You are treating speech as a duty when stakes are real. The danger is becoming addicted to opposition.
The news makes you feel responsible and useless at once.
You are matching concern to agency so that concern can become action. The cost is a world that shrinks to the size of your street.
Reading Voltaire today
Voltaire wrote in 1694–1778, from France — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Voltaire is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 15 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Baruch Spinoza — Netherlands, 1632–1677
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Henry David Thoreau — USA, 1817–1862
- Immanuel Kant — Prussia, 1724–1804
Argues the same cases
Lao Tzu, Buddha, Confucius, John Locke, Mahatma Gandhi, Hannah Arendt take positions on the same dilemmas as Voltaire, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.