“What put me off studying the law,” [Voltaire] later told his friend the marquis d’Argenson in 1739, “was the vast amount of useless rubbish they wanted to load into my brain. ‘Get to the point,’ that’s my motto.”
“Any genre will do, except the one that bores.”
“I think that from now on we ought to put everything in dictionaries. Life is too short for reading so many fat tomes one after another. Woe to long dissertations!”
“It needs only five or six philosophes of like mind and we can topple the colossus.’”
“If there is one thing that can stay the hand of fanatical rage, it is publicity.”
“If God made us in His image, we have certainly returned the compliment.”
“Reader, you must reflect. Develop this truth: draw your own conclusions.”
–from Roger Pearson’s Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom
