Voltaire quotes

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.

-William Blake
^3  MS Notebooks, p.7.

Imagine Rousseau,Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine, and Hegel united in one personI say united, not lumped togetherand you have Dr Marx.

- Moses Hess
Quoted in  A J P  Taylor's introduction to the Penguin edition of The Communist Manifesto (1967).

Je  sus a pleure , Voltaire a souri; c'est de cette larme divine et de ce sourire humain qu'est faite la douceur de la civilisation actuelle. Jesus wept;Voltairesmiled.Of that divinetearand of that human smile the sweetness of present civilization is composed.

-Victor Marie Hugo
  Speech on Voltaire's centenary, 30 May.

Where do you get your taste in authorsThat damned library of yours! (He indicates the small bookcase at rear.) Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Ibsen! Atheists, fools, and madmen! And your poets! This Dowson, and this Baudelaire, and Swinburne and O'Neill Oscar Wilde, and Whitman and Poe! Whoremongers and degenerates! Pah! When I've three good sets of Shakespeare there (he nods at the large bookcase) you could read.

- Eugene Gladstone O'Neill
^41  Tyrone. Long Day's Journey Into Night, act 4 (published 1956).

Voltaire! CommeVoltaire, toujours commeVoltaire. Voltaire! Like Voltaire, always like Voltaire.

- Fran c° ois-Joseph Talma
  Last words.