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Famous Voltaire Quotes

“People must have renounced, it seems to me, all natural intelligence to dare to advance that animals are but animated machines.... It appears to me, besides, that such people can never have observed with attention the character of animals, not to have distinguished among them the different voices of need, of suffering, of joy, of pain, of love, of anger, and of all their affections. It would be very strange that they should express so well what they could not feel.”

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Author:Voltaire
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“Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spectacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have breeches. Stones were formed to be quarried and to build castles; and My Lord has a very noble castle; the greatest Baron in the province should have the best house; and as pigs were made to be eaten, we eat pork all year round; consequently, those who have asserted all is well talk nonsense; they ought to have said that all is for the best.”

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Book:The Portable Voltaire
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“It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?”

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Book:Candide
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“The punishment of criminals should be of use; when a man is hanged he is good for nothing.”

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Book:The philosophical dictionary for the pocket: Written in French by a society of men of letters, and translated into English from the last Geneva edition, corrected by the authors. With notes, ...
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“The worthy administrators of justice are like a cat set to take care of a cheese, lest it should be gnawed by the mice. One bite of the cat does more damage to the cheese than twenty mice can do.”

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Book:VOLTAIRE – Premium Collection: Novels, Philosophical Writings, Historical Works, Plays, Poems & Letters (60+ Works in One Volume) - Illustrated: Candide, A Philosophical Dictionary, A Treatise on Toleration, Plato's Dream, The Princess of Babylon, Zadig, The Huron, Socrates, The Sage and the Atheist, Dialogues, Oedipus, Caesar…
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“I should like to know which is worse: to be ravished a hundred times by pirates, and have a buttock cut off, and run the gauntlet of the Bulgarians, and be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fe, and be dissected, and have to row in a galley -- in short, to undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered -- or simply to sit here and do nothing?' That is a hard question,' said Candide.”

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Author:Voltaire
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