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Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (29 September 1881 – 10 October 1973) was an Austrian economist, philosopher, author and classical liberal who had a significant influence on the modern libertarian movement and the Austrian School of economics.

Quotes

 * The goal of liberalism is the peaceful cooperation of all men. It aims at peace among nations too. When there is private ownership of the means of production everywhere and when laws, the tribunals and the administration treat foreigners and citizens on equal terms, it is of little importance where a country's frontiers are drawn. Nobody can derive any profit from conquest, but many can suffer losses from fighting. War no longer pays; there is no motive for aggression. The population of every territory is free to determine to which state it wishes to belong, or whether it prefers to establish a state of its own. All nations can coexist peacefully, because no nation is concerned about the size of its state.
 * Omnipotent Government : The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944)

 * The characteristic feature of militarism is not the fact that a nation has a powerful army or navy. It is the paramount role assigned to the army within the political structure. Even in peacetime the army is supreme; it is the predominant factor in political life. The subjects must obey the government as soldiers must obey their superiors. Within a militarist community there is no freedom; there are only obedience and discipline.
 * Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944)

 * Inflation is an increase in the quantity of money without a corresponding increase in the demand for money, i.e., for cash holdings.
 * The Free Market and Its Enemies, speech to the Foundation for Economic Education (1951)

 * If one rejects laissez faire on account of man's fallibility and moral weakness, one must for the same reason also reject every kind of government action.
 * Planning for Freedom (1952), p. 44

 * You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your conditions which you simply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you. If this be arrogance, as some of your critics observed, it is still the truth that had to said in the age of the Welfare State.
 * Mises' letter to Ayn Rand praising Atlas Shrugged,(23 January 1958), quoted in Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism (2007).

Theory of Money and Credit (1912)

 * The proof of a theory is in its reasoning, not in its sponsorship

Nation, State, and Economy (1919)
Institute for Humane Studies, Menlo Park, California, trans. Leland B. Yeager, 1983
 * War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.
 * p 186
 * Bourgeois civilization has built railroads and electric power plants, has invented explosives and airplanes, in order to create wealth. Imperialism has placed the tools of peace in the service of destruction. With modern means it would be easy to wipe out humanity at one blow.
 * p. 252

Socialism (1922)

 * Die Gemeinwirtschaft : Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus — "Socialism : An Economic and Sociological Analysis" (1922) - full text online

 * Socialism is the watchword and the catchword of our day. The socialist idea dominates the modem spirit. The masses approve of it. It expresses the thoughts and feelings of all; it has set its seal upon our time. When history comes to tell our story it will write above the chapter "The Epoch of Socialism." As yet, it is true, Socialism has not created a society which can be said to represent its ideal. But for more than a generation the policies of civilized nations have been directed towards nothing less than a gradual realization of Socialism.
 * Introduction : The Success of Socialist Ideas

 * All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.
 * Part II : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § I : The Economics of an Isolated Socialist Community, Ch. 5 : The Nature of Economic Activity, p. 97

 * Permanent mass unemployment destroys the moral foundations of the social order. The young people, who, having finished their training for work, are forced to remain idle, are the ferment out of which the most radical political movements are formed. In their ranks the soldiers of the coming revolutions are recruited.
 * Part V : The Economics of a Socialist Community, § V : Destructionism, Ch. 33 : The Motive Powers of Destructionism, p. 440

Epilogue (1947)

 * Originally published as Planned Chaos (1947)

 * The characteristic mark of this age of dictators, wars and revolutions is its anti-capitalistic bias. Most governments and political parties are eager to restrict the sphere of private initiative and free enterprise. It is an almost unchallenged dogma that capitalism is done for and that the coming of all-round regimentation of economic activities is both inescapable and highly desirable.

 * Government spending cannot create additional jobs. If the government provides the funds required by taxing the citizens or by borrowing from the public, it abolishes on the one hand as many jobs as it creates on the other. If government spending is financed by borrowing from the commercial banks, it means credit expansion and inflation. If in the course of such an inflation the rise in commodity prices exceeds the rise in nominal wage rates, unemployment will drop. But what makes unemployment shrink is precisely the fact that real wage rates are falling.

 * Credit expansion can bring about a temporary boom. But such a fictitious prosperity must end in a general depression of trade, a slump.

 * The interventionists do not approach the study of economic matters with scientific disinterestedness. Most of them are driven by an envious resentment against those whose incomes are larger than their own. This bias makes it impossible for them to see things as they really are. For them the main thing is not to improve the conditions of the masses, but to harm the entrepreneurs and capitalists even if this policy victimizes the immense majority of the people.

 * No social co-operation under the division of labour is possible when some people or unions of people are granted the right to prevent by violence and the threat of violence other people from working. When enforced by violence, a strike in vital branches of production or a general strike are tantamount to a revolutionary destruction of society.

 * Whatever people do in the market economy, is the execution of their own plans. In this sense every human action means planning. What those calling themselves planners advocate is not the substitution of planned action for letting things go. It is the substitution of the planner's own plan for the plans of his fellow-men. The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute pre-eminence of his own plan.

 * When people were committed to the idea that in the field of religion only one plan must be adopted, bloody wars resulted. With the acknowledgment of the principle of religious freedom these wars ceased. The market economy safeguards peaceful economic co-operation because it does not use force upon the economic plans of the citizens. If one master plan is to be substituted for the plans of each citizen, endless fighting must emerge. Those who disagree with the dictator's plan have no other means to carry on than to defeat the despot by force of arms.

 * State and government are the social apparatus of violent coercion and repression. Such an apparatus, the police power, is indispensable in order to prevent anti-social individuals and bands from destroying social co-operation. Violent prevention and suppression of anti-social activities benefit the whole of society and each of its members. But violence and oppression are none the less evils and corrupt those in charge of their application. It is necessary to restrict the power of those in office lest they become absolute despots. Society cannot exist without an apparatus of violent coercion. But neither can it exist if the office holders are irresponsible tyrants free to inflict harm upon those they dislike.

 * All this talk: the state should do this or that, ultimately means: the police should force consumers to behave otherwise than they would behave spontaneously.

 * In fact, however, the supporters of the welfare state are utterly anti-social and intolerant zealots. For their ideology tacitly implies that the government will exactly execute what they themselves deem right and beneficial. They entirely disregard the possibility that there could arise disagreement with regard to the question of what is right and expedient and what is not. They advocate enlightened despotism, but they are convinced that the enlightened despot will in every detail comply with their own opinion concerning the measures to be adopted. They favour planning, but what they have in mind is exclusively their own plan, not those of other people. They want to exterminate all opponents, that is, all those who disagree with them. They are utterly intolerant and are not prepared to allow any discussion. Every advocate of the welfare state and of planning is a potential dictator. What he plans is to deprive all other men of all their rights, and to establish his own and his friends' unrestricted omnipotence. He refuses to convince his fellow-citizens. He prefers to "liquidate" them. He scorns the "bourgeois" society that worships law and legal procedure. He himself worships violence and bloodshed.

 * From a correct Marxian point of view … all measures designed to restrain, to regulate and to improve capitalism were simply "petty-bourgeois" nonsense … True socialists should not place any obstacles in the way of capitalist evolution. For only the full maturity of capitalism could bring about socialism. It is not only vain, but harmful to the interests of the proletarians to resort to such measures.

 * For the time being, the ominous peril of the communist parties in the West lies in their stand on foreign affairs. The distinctive mark of all present-day communist parties is their devotion to the aggressive foreign policy of the Soviets. Whenever they must choose between Russia and their own country, they do not hesitate to prefer Russia. Their principle is: Right or wrong, my Russia. They strictly obey all orders issued from Moscow. When Russia was an ally of Hitler, the French communists sabotaged their own country's war effort and the American communists passionately opposed President Roosevelt's plans to aid England and France in their struggle against the Nazis.

 * It is, they say, not Russia that plans aggression but, on the contrary, the decaying capitalist democracies. Russia wants merely to defend its own independence. This is an old and well-tried method of justifying aggression. Louis XIV and Napoleon I, Wilhelm II and Hitler were the most peace-loving of all men. When they invaded foreign countries, they did so only in just self-defence. Russia was as much menaced by Estonia or Latvia as Germany was by Luxemburg or Denmark.

 * It is a fact that Mussolini entered the scene of world politics as an ally of the democracies, while Lenin entered it as a virtual ally of imperial Germany.

 * There were nowhere more docile disciples of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin than the Nazis were.

 * The only certain fact about Russian affairs under the Soviet regime with regard to which all people agree is: that the standard of living of the Russian masses is much lower than ... the paragon of capitalism, the United States of America. If we were to regard the Soviet regime as an experiment, we would have to say that the experiment has clearly demonstrated the superiority of capitalism and the inferiority of socialism.

Liberalism (1927)

 * Liberalismus, translated as Liberalism : In the Classical Tradition (1985) by Ralph Raico

 * Now it cannot be denied that the only way one can offer effective resistance to violent assaults is by violence. Against the weapons of the Bolsheviks, weapons must be used in reprisal, and it would be a mistake to display weakness before murderers. No liberal has ever called this into question. What distinguishes liberal from Fascist political tactics is not a difference of opinion in regard to the necessity of using armed force to resist armed attackers, but a difference in the fundamental estimation of the role of violence in a struggle for power. The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence. In order to assure success, one must be imbued with the will to victory and always proceed violently. This is its highest principle. What happens, however, when one's opponent, similarly animated by the will to be victorious, acts just as violently? The result must be a battle, a civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge from such conflicts will be the faction strongest in number. In the long run, a minority — even if it is composed of the most capable and energetic — cannot succeed in resisting the majority. The decisive question, therefore, always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one's own party? This, however, is a purely intellectual matter. It is a victory that can be won only with the weapons of the intellect, never by force. The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one's cause. Resort to naked force — that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion — merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.
 * Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 10. The Argument of Fascism

 * Repression by brute force is always a confession of the inability to make use of the better weapons of the intellect — better because they alone give promise of final success. This is the fundamental error from which Fascism suffers and which will ultimately cause its downfall. The victory of Fascism in a number of countries is only an episode in the long series of struggles over the problem of property. The next episode will be the victory of Communism. The ultimate outcome of the struggle, however, will not be decided by arms, but by ideas. It is ideas that group men into fighting factions, that press the weapons into their hands, and that determine against whom and for whom the weapons shall be used. It is they alone, and not arms, that, in the last analysis, turn the scales. So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one's own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone. It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.
 * Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 10 : The Argument of Fascism

 * A free man must be able to endure it when his fellow men act and live otherwise than he considers proper. He must free himself from the habit, just as soon as something does not please him, of calling for the police.
 * Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 11 : The Limits of Governmental Activity

 * As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this is an evil. A government that, instead of fulfilling its task, sought to go so far as actually to infringe on personal security of life and health, freedom, and property would, of course, be altogether bad.
 * Ch. 1 : The Foundations of Liberal Policy § 11. The Limits of Governmental Activity

Interventionism: An Economic Analysis (1940)

 * The unhampered market economy is not a system which would seem commendable from the standpoint of the selfish group interests of the entrepreneurs and capitalists. It is not the particular interests of a group or of individual persons that require the market economy, but regard for the common welfare. It is not true that the advocates of the free-market economy are defenders of the selfish interests of the rich. The particular interests of the entrepreneurs and capitalists also demand interventionism to protect them against the competition of more efficient and active men. The free development of the market economy is to be recommended, not in the interest of the rich, but in the interest of the masses of the people.
 * Ch. VII : The Economic, Social, and Political Consequences of Interventionism § 1. The Economic Consequences

Bureaucracy (1944)

 * Bureaucracy (1944) online

 * The capitalist system of production is an economic democracy in which every penny gives a right to vote. The consumers are the sovereign people. The capitalists, the entrepreneurs, and the farmers are the people’s mandatories. If they do not obey, if they fail to produce, at the lowest possible cost, what the consumers are asking for, they lose their office. Their task is service to the consumer. Profit and loss are the instruments by means of which the consumers keep a tight rein on all business activities.
 * Chapter I: Profit Management, § 1: The Operation of The Market Mechanism

Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944)

 * Omnipotent Government (1944) online

 * The state is God, deifies arms and prisons. The worship of the state is the worship of force. There is no more dangerous menace to civilization than a government of incompetent, corrupt, or vile men. The worst evils which mankind ever had to endure were inﬂicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster.
 * Chapter III: Etatism

Human Action (1949)

 * Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949, 1966); 1st and 4th editions online

 * A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
 * 1963 edition, p. 680

 * ...racial hatred is not a natural phenomenon innate in man. It is the product of ideologies. But even if such a thing as a natural and inborn hatred between various races existed, it would not render social cooperation futile and would not invalidate Ricardo's theory of association. Social cooperation has nothing to do with personal love or with a general commandment to love one another. People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.
 * Part 2, VIII.84

 * There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.
 * Chapter XX: Interest, Credit Expansion, The Trade Cycle, § 8 : The Monetary or Circulation Theory of the Trade Cycle

 * If one takes pleasure in calling the gold standard a "barbarous relic," one cannot object to the application of the same term to every historically determined institution. Then the fact that the British speak English — and not Danish, German, or French — is a barbarous relic too, and every Briton who opposes the substitution of Esperanto for English is no less dogmatic and orthodox than those who do not wax rapturous about the plans for a managed currency.
 * The Gold Standard - LvMI, excerpt from chapter 17 of Human Action

 * If historical experience could teach us anything, it would be that private property is inextricably linked with civilization.
 * Chapter XV. The Market, § 4 The Scope and Method of Catallactics

 * Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment. Neither is value in words and doctrines, it is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act.

 * People do not cooperate under the division of labor because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.

The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962)

 * Full text online

 * The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.
 * Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, § 9 : The Belief in the Omnipotence of Thought

 * It is a double-edged makeshift to entrust an individual or a group of individuals with the authority to resort to violence. The enticement implied is too tempting for a human being. The men who are to protect the community against violent aggression easily turn into the most dangerous aggressors. They transgress their mandate. They misuse their power for the oppression of those whom they were expected to defend against oppression. The main political problem is how to prevent the police power from becoming tyrannical. This is the meaning of all the struggles for liberty.
 * Chapter 5: On Some Popular Errors Concerning the Scope and Method of Economics, § 10 : The Concept of a Perfect System of Government

Quotes about Mises

 * In the 1920s, Mises made important contributions to monetary economics, business cycle theory and of course socialist economics, but his later writings on the foundations of economic science are so idiosyncratic and dogmatically stated that we can only wonder that they have been taken seriously by anyone.
 * Mark Blaug, The Methodology of Economics: Or, How Economists Explain (2nd ed., 1992), p. 81

 * Just when the hopes of socialism seemed to be about to come true, Mises voiced the thoughts uppermost in the minds of so many who lacked the courage to speak out. Socialism could not work or keep its promises, he argued, because under such a system economic calculations in terms of value were rendered impossible.
 * Raimondo Cubeddu, The Philosophy of the Austrian School (1993), 114.

 * Among Mises’s greatest personal attributes was courage. He had the force of will and character to maintain a position that he thought true even if almost no one else did.
 * Alan Ebenstein, Hayek's Journey (2003), Ch. 4 : Ludwig von Mises

 * While it is possible to imagine Mises without Hayek, it is not possible to imagine Hayek without Mises.
 * Alan Ebenstein, Hayek's Journey (2003), Ch. 4 : Ludwig von Mises

 * Professor von Mises has a splendid analytical mind and an admirable passion for liberty; but as a student of human nature he is worse than null and as a debater he is of Hyde Park standard.
 * The Economist magazine, "Liberalism in Caricature", (Review of The Anti-Capitalist Mentality) April 13, 1957.

 * The market, even more than the wheel, is one of the great commonplace servants of man. Professor Mises powerfully defends it against those who would subvert it to the service of selfish or shortsighted ends. But it is possible that the defense is stronger when in the hands of somewhat more moderate men. One is also bound to be puzzled over who is to vote in and support the economic and political order that Professor Mises demands. He is a vigorous foe of autocrats and dictators but he also has little respect for people at large. Defending advertising, to choose one example among many, he observes: "Like all things designed to suit the taste of the masses, it is repellent to people of delicate feeling." I wouldn't suppose that the people of delicate feeling are yet in the strength to take over.
 * John Kenneth Galbraith, "In Defense of Laissez-Faire", The New York Times (Oct. 30, 1949)

 * As readers will remember, Mises in his famous socialist calculation argument proved that a fully socialist economy would collapse into chaos. If this is right, how can ostensibly socialist economies such as Soviet Russia exist? In answer, Mises said that these economies weren’t fully socialist. They allowed scope for private enterprise, albeit of a limited sort. Mises’s point applies to the German form of socialism as well as the Russian.
 * David Gordon, Yes, the Nazis Were Socialists, Mises Institute, October 2020

 * There is no single man to whom I owe more intellectually, even though he [Mises] was never my teacher in the institutional sense of the word.
 * Friedrich Hayek, “Coping with Ignorance,” Imprimis 7 (1978)

 * Though I learned that he [Mises] usually was right in his conclusions, I wasn't always satisfied by his arguments, and retained to the end a certain critical attitude which sometimes forced me to build different constructions, which however, to my great pleasure, usually led to the same conclusions. I am to the present moment pursuing the questions which he made me see, and that, I believe is the greatest benefit one scientist can confer on one of the next generation.
 * Friedrich Hayek, “Coping with Ignorance,” Imprimis 7 (1978)

 * ...there I came to know him (Mises) mainly as a tremendously efficient executive, the kind of man who, as was said of John Stuart Mill, because he does a normal day's work in two hours, always has a clear desk and time to talk about anything. I came to know him as one of the best educated and informed men I have ever known...
 * Friedrich Hayek, quoted in Margit von Mises, My Years with Ludwig von Mises, Center for Future Education, 1984, pp. 219–220.

 * I probably was ... when I began my study, called the Fabian kind of approach and convinced that there must be intelligent solution of the many dissatisfactory events of this world. And so it was as a mild socialist, that I decided I must study economics. I was very soon 'cured' of these beliefs that socialism was the solution because I came after three years, and as a direct influence of Ludwig von Mises, who had then published his great book on Socialism demonstrating that the socialist solution was impossible in a technical sense.
 * Friedrich Hayek, in 1985 interview with John O'Sullivan

 * It turns out, of course, that Mises was right. The Soviet system has long been dogged by a method of pricing that produced grotesque misallocations of effort. The difficulties were not so visible in the early days of Soviet industrialization or in the post-Second World War reconstruction period. The dams and mills and entire new cities of the nineteen-thirties astonished the world, as did the Chinese Great Leap Forward of the nineteen-fifties, which performed similar miracles from a still lower base. But those undertakings, like the building of the Pyramids or the Great Wall, depended less on economic coordination than on the political capacity for marshalling vast labor forces. Inefficiency set in when projects had to be joined into a complex whole – a process that required knowing how much things should cost. As Mises foresaw, setting prices became a hopeless problem, because the economy never stood still long enough for anyone to decide anything correctly.
 * Robert Heilbroner, 'The Triumph of Capitalism', The New Yorker (23 January 1989)

 * Socialists have certainly good reason to be grateful to Professor Mises, the great advocatus diaboli of their cause. For it was his powerful challenge that forced the socialists to recognise the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting to guide the allocation of resources in a socialist economy. Even more, it was chiefly due to Professor Mises' challenge that many socialists became aware of the very existence of such a problem.... [T]he merit of having caused the socialists to approach this problem systematically belongs entirely to Professor Mises. Both as an expression of recognition for the great service rendered by him and as a memento of the prime importance of sound economic accounting, a statue of Professor Mises ought to occupy an honorable place in the great hall of the Ministry of Socialisation or of the Central Planning Board of the socialist state.
 * Oskar R. Lange, 'On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One', The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (October 1936), p. 53

 * The dictatorship of the proletariat was the logical extension of Lenin’s agitprop; Fascism was more than the logical extension of liberty – it was embraced by Ludwig von Mises (1985 [1927], 42–51), the co-leader of the third generation Austrian School, [...] Mises’ political activity was consistent with his ideology: on 1 March 1934, he joined the Austro-Fascist Patriotic Front and their Werk Neues Leben social club (Hülsmann 2007, 677, n149). Mises may also have been a victim of propaganda: his justification for this tactical embrace was that fascists would protect property – the protection of which he saw as the very essence of liberty. [...] The Jewish-born Mises was lucky to escape with his life; he devoted much of the rest of it to describing his opponents as ‘Fascists’.
 * Robert Leeson, Introduction in Hayek: A Collaborative Biography, Part III, Fraud, Fascism and Free Market Religion (2015), edited by Robert Leeson
 * Mises (pronounced Mee-zis) was by far the most important figure of the Austrian School of economics. The Austrians eschewed economic calculation for a more philosophical approach to issues of finance and trade. They viewed modern theories as highly mathematical, heavily conceptual, and largely divorced from reality. For them, virtually every contemporary economist is akin to a geocentrist using increasingly complicated models to predict how celestial bodies circled the Earth. Difficult math doesn’t make a calculation true, and neither does it make its practitioner smart. This disdain for statistics can be seen in the New Right’s contempt for using numeric data as a mechanism of persuasion. It’s about the story, not the numbers.
 * Michael Malice, The New Right: A Journey into the Fringe of American Politics (2019)
 * Mises was born in 1881 in my hometown of Lvov, in what is now Ukraine. He emigrated from Eastern Europe to New York in 1940 and became perhaps the most thoroughgoing American defender of laissez-faire capitalism. Years later Milton Friedman would recount a story about the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, held in 1947. The group was meant to bring together what Europeans would call liberal intellectuals and what Americans would describe as libertarians. As Friedman recalled, “We were discussing the distribution of income, and whether you should have progressive income taxes. Some of the people there were expressing the view that there could be a justification for it.” Furiously and famously, Mises declared, “You’re all a bunch of socialists!” and stormed out. Much like Rand with rent control, Mises felt that once income distribution is on the table, the jig is basically up. It simply becomes a matter of haggling over how much socialism there is.
 * Michael Malice, The New Right: A Journey into the Fringe of American Politics (2019)

title: Ludwig von Mises


text:
James Hetfield

James Alan Hetfield (born August 3, 1963) is an American musician and songwriter, best known as the co-founder, lead vocalist, rhythm guitarist and primary songwriter for heavy metal band Metallica.

Quotes

 * Are you saying it's too loud? It's got to be loud. You're supposed to feel it all over.
 * Playboy, April 2001

 * I like playing music because it's a good living and I get satisfaction from it. But I can't feed my family with satisfaction.
 * Playboy, April 2001

 * Lars would talk his way into their pants. Kirk had a babyface that was appealing to the girls. And Cliff; he had a big dick. Word got around about that, I guess.
 * Playboy April 2001.

 * Dying, dying, someone told me just recently, dying is easy. Living is hard. for everyone.
 * MusiCares, May 14, 2006

 * If I hadn't have had music in my life, it's quite possible I could be in here. Or nor even in here, be dead — and I'd much rather be alive.
 * at St Quentin, during the videoshoot for St Anger

 * Everybody is born good and everybody has got the same size soul. We're here to connect with that.
 * at St Quentin during the videoshoot for St Anger

 * All the drinking and all the other junk that I was stuck in... It was so predictable. So boring. I wake up the next day - somewhere, in some bed, I don't know who this person is next to me... and I'm drunk, competely hung over and have a show to do. The result is the same... When life now is pretty... exciting. You don't know what's gonna happen.
 * Some Kind of Monster, 2003 - Talking about his addictions and big changes.

 * It had to be something real bad. I think he stole music online.
 * Asked what the narrator in "Ride The Lightning" did to earn the death penalty

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: James Hetfield


text:
Talk:Voltaire

Older comments
At the end of Candide Voltaire says 'IL faut cultiver le jardin'. What is meant by this?

 * "The garden should be cultivated" can be taken to mean or imply many things; perhaps most applicably in relation to that tale, that the garden of thoughts or ideas one should cultivate sense and weed out nonsense, or that in the garden of the world, one must weed out the vile for the desirable to flourish and survive, but arguments could be made for other meanings and implications. ~ Kalki 15:27, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

 * As I get older I come more and more to the view that this is not a metaphor at all, or at least not only a metaphor, but words of sage practical advice. Voltaire was sixty-five in 1759 when Candide was published. Also, from about 1750 onwards, there was a revolution in French landscape garden|French garden design, which was wound up with Enlightenment ideals and theories. Voltaire was fully party to this discussion, and practiced what he preached. A very rich man, he bought the lordship of Fernex, a small village near the Swiss border, in 1758, and proceeded to develop the whole area as if it were his garden. He began by changing the name of the town to Ferney - "too many towns ending with X in this part of the world" - built a large chateau for himself, complete with landscaped and formal gardens, a lake, terraces and an orangery as well as a working farm. He went on to develop the town itself, draining the marshes, building more than 100 houses, funding the erection of a church, school, water reservoir and town fountain. He instigated regular markets and encouraged artisans to settle there, and during the famine of 1771 he personally fed the inhabitants of the town, which by his death in 1778 had grown from a hundred or so to over a thousand inhabitants. This is gardening on a very large scale. Voltaire was involved in the design, supervised the works himself, and was to be found from time to time with his sleeves rolled up, gardening.

 * Voltaire's literary output remained as prodigious as ever during the development of Ferney, and I think that he actually practiced what he is heartily recommending to us in the novel. Activity in a garden, even on a small scale, allows any amount of ideals and theories to be tested in a very practical way, by interacting directly with the laws of nature to produce an aesthetically satisfactory result. It is very easy to see a philosopher, especially a productive one, in a garden. He was serious, in other words. (-Concord113) 109.77.99.242 01:22, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Are these Voltaire?
Frequently attributed to Voltaire on the 'net, but never with a source, and never with the French, are these two:- "Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world." and "There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts."
 * The second quote is listed in both Bartlett's Quotations and the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations as being from Dialogue, XIV, "Le Chapon et la Poularde" (1766). Oxford includes the original French: Ils ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices, et n'emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées.  The translation for this is given as: [Men] use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to conceal their thoughts. InvisibleSun 13:10, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
 * I have sourced the statement "Let us read," etc. and added it to the Voltaire quotes. InvisibleSun 01:04, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

I heard a speaker give it with different wording, but he attributed the following to Voltaire: "History is only the pattern of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below." I think he began the quote as, "History is the patter of silk slippers . . ." Any opinions on this? Source? I just read this quote for the first time on another place. My impulse lead to the same conclusion as the speaker you mentioned, that it should be patter instead of pattern. I have no scholarship or source on which to base this conclusion, only my reason.
 * I also heard this quote attributed to Voltaire by Dan Carlin on the show Hardcore History, in this episode: http://www.dancarlin.com/disp.php/hharchive/Show-33---(BLITZ)-Old-School-Toughness/%20history-lifecycles-empire although he used "silk slippers" and "wooden sandals."

 * I've seen the quote rendered as "wooden shoes", which would have made more sense in Voltaire's time and location than "sandals" does. Wooden shoes were common in several areas of northern and western Europe as a poor man's shoe, and that fits the meaning of the quote, to contrast luxury with poverty.  Best regardsTheBaron0530 (talk) 18:46, 18 November 2021 (UTC)

 * Burton W. Jones of the University of Colorado, Boulder, wrote in "Silken slippers and hobnailed boots," an article in "The Mathematics Teacher" (May, 1959) the following as being attributed to Voltaire. He used the word "pattern" but the correct word was probably "patter": History is but the patter of silken slippers descending the stairs to the thunder of hobnailed boots climbing upward from below. - Embram (talk) 04:19, 2 January 2022 (UTC)

Anyone heard of this? "One day everything will be well, that is our hope. Everything's fine today, that is our illusion."
 * «Un jour tout sera bien, voilà notre espérance ; Tout est bien aujourd’hui, voilà l’illusion.» From: Voltaire: Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756) http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Po%C3%A8me_sur_le_d%C3%A9sastre_de_Lisbonne 84.114.119.37 13:25, 8 January 2015 (UTC)

Text of letter
From the main article:

A M. LE RICHE,

A AMIENS.

6 février.

''Vous avez quitté, monsieur, des Welches pour des Welches. Vous trouverez partout des barbares têtus. Le nombre des sages sera toujours petit. Il est vrai qu’il est augmenté ; mais ce n’est rien en comparaison des sots ; et, par malheur, on dit que Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons. Il faut que les honnêtes gens se tiennent serrés et couverts. Il n’y a pas moyen que leur petite troupe attaque le parti des fanatiques en rase campagne.

''J’ai été très malade, je suis à la mort tous les hivers ; c’est ce qui fait, monsieur, que je vous ai répondu si tard. Je n’en suis pas moins touché de votre souvenir. Continuez-moi votre amitié ; elle me console de mes maux et des sottises du genre humain.''

Recevez les assurances, etc.

Wikiquote is not meant to be a repository of complete texts. Such things should go in frsource, probably. However, a graver concern is that the only references I seem to find for this text are from wikimedia projects (mostly, French wikipedia and mirrors). Where can this text be found, published by a reputable source? It's fine if it's not online, if it's a book, I would greatly appreciate an ISBN, if it's a journal, details of name, date, publisher. Especially when this text is used to prove a point, I would like some kind of proof of its lineage to Voltaire. Thanks ~ MosheZadka (Talk) 10:16, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Several remarks here:

1) The Wikiquote page on Evelyn Beatrice Hall, besides discussing the apocryphal quote of Voltaire, provides links that discuss the matter further. The use of the above-cited letter can be traced to Norbert Guterman's "A Book of French Quotations" (1963), in which he claims that this letter of Voltaire contained the phrase "Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to write." Guterman said that this would have been the likely source for Hall's now famous summation of Voltaire's thought.  Hall said, however, that Voltaire was addressing himself to Claude Adrien Helvétius (concerning his book "De L'Esprit"), whereas this letter is addressed to a Monsieur le Riche.  Just to complicate matters more, Helvétius was not an abbé.  I have yet to discover who le Riche was.  2) I find it interesting that this letter, although it does not have the remark cited by Guterman, does in fact have another well-known remark of Voltaire: "It is said that God is always on the side of the big battalions" [On dit que Dieu est toujours pour les gros bataillons]. Considering how many letters Voltaire had written, it seems quite a coincidence that this should be so. (Bartlett's cites this letter to le Riche for the "big battalions" quote.) Is it possible that Guterman, compiling a book of quotations, mixed up his references in providing sources?

3) This letter is quoted in full, as above, in the French Wikipedia article "Tolérance." footnote to article

4) In any case, considering how thoroughly the Evelyn Beatrice Hall page and its links deal with the matter of the misattributed quotation, I think there's no more need to cite the letter on the page of Voltaire quotes; and I will edit for the same. InvisibleSun 03:51, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

The perfect is the enemy of the good
The article has:

quote

Original: Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. Source: "Dramatic Art," Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

unquote

There is a problem with this type of attribution. There are essentially two different things called "Dictionnaire philosophique".

The first is a book, published during Voltaire's lifetime, from 1764 onwards, in many editions, with different titles, including "Dictionnaire philosophique portatif" (1764), "La Raison par alphabet", "Questions sur l'Encyclopédie par des amateurs" (1770), "L'Opinion par alphabet", "Dictionnaire philosophique". In none of these, to my knowledge, is there an essay on Dramatic Art, much less the quoted text in question. See, eg. [1, pp. xxii--xxix], [2].

The second Dictionnaire philosophique is included as part of various versions of the Complete Works of Voltaire. This second Dictionnaire contains much that Voltaire never himself published under this title. According to [3]:

quote

Les éditeurs de Kehl (Condorcet et Decroix) ont refondu, dans ce Dictionnaire: 1° les Questions sur l'Encyclopédie; 2° L'Opinion par alphabet; 3° les articles insérés dans l'Encyclopédie; 4° plusieurs articles destinés par l'auteur au Dictionnaire de l'Académie; et 50 divers fragments séparés.

unquote

See also [1, pp. xvi--xvii], [2, pp. 7--8]

I therefore have a challenge. Could someone please tell me the publisher and year of the book in which the quote appears, the page number and the context, eg. the sentences before and after the quote.

References

[1] Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, comprenant les 118 articles parus sous ce titre du vivant de Voltaire avec leures suppléments parus dans les Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, Introduction, relevé des variants et notes par Julien Benda, Text établi par Raymond Naves, Garnier Frères, 1961, printed 1965.

[2] Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, Translated by Theodore Besterman, Penguin Books, 1972, ISBN 0-14-044257-X.

[3] L'association Voltaire intégral, Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, Préface de la cinquième édition. (1765.) http://www.voltaire-integral.com/Html/17/3preface.htm

leopardi 13:53, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

 * This quote, which Bartlett's and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations cite as from "Dramatic Art" in the Dictionnaire philosophique, would appear to be based on the following:

1) In the 1772 poem, La Bégueule, Voltaire begins with the lines:

Dans ses écrits un sage Italien Dit que le mieux est l’ennemi du bien;

The footnote (# 22) on this page states: "Voltaire cite le vers italien dans son article Art dramatique du Dictionnaire philosophique."

2) The second Dictionnaire philosophique (as you have cited it in # 3 of your post) has an article "Art Dramatique", which concludes with these lines:

C’est bien ici qu’on peut dire:

Il meglio è l’inimico del bene

It would seem to me, then, that the best way to present this quote would be to say that it is from La Bégueule, where it is in French, rather than from Art Dramatique. InvisibleSun 17:40, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

 * Thanks for your prompt reply. It would appear then, that the main Wikipedia article contains a number of incorrect attributions, especially in relation to dates.

The following articles appear in "Dictionnaire philosophique portratif" (1764 and later editions of "Dictionnaire philosophique") and are therefore correctly attributed in the main article: "Atheist," "Character," "Equality," "Fatherland," "Prejudices," "Tolerance," "Tyranny."

The following article appears in "Dictionnaire philosophique portratif" (1765 and later editions of "Dictionnaire philosophique") and should be dated 1765 in the main article: "Common Sense."

The following articles probably appear only in the Dictionnaire philosophique portion of the Complete Works, since they do not appear in my references [1] or [2]: "Charity, " "Divorce, " "Dramatic Art, " "Liberty of the Press, " "Man: General Reflection on Man, " "Money ," "Oracles, " "Power, Omnipotence, " "Prayers, " "Rights. " The date of 1764 seems to be simply wrong for these articles. Each one of these could have been written at a different time for different purposes.

leopardi 15:06, 19 December 2005 (UTC)

 * In order to further refine the dating of the quotes from the Dictionnaire philosophique, they can be broken down into three categories based on the complicated publication history:

1) The Dictionnaire philosophique portatif, originally published in 1764. Later editions included additional articles and sometimes omitted previous material.  It was printed through 1777 and went under a number of titles: Dictionnaire philosophique portatif; La Raison par alphabet; Dictionnaire philosophique, ou la Raison par alphabet; La Raison par alphabet, ou supplement au Questions sur l'Encyclopédie; and Fragments sur divers sujets par ordre alphabetique.

2) The Questions sur l'Encylopédie, in various editions from 1770 through 1774, including articles originally written as far back as 1752 and including a number of articles from the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif/La Raison par l'alphabet, some of them extensively rewritten.

3) The posthumous "édition de Kehl," 1785-1789, edited by Beaumarchais and others, which combined the above two categories and added: Opinion sur l'alphabet (an unpublished manuscript); articles Voltaire had written for l'Encyclopédie and for the Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française; and a number of previously published miscellaneous articles by Voltaire, dating over a long period. These works were all combined under the title Dictionnaire philosophique, as you had mentioned in your note above.

A brief summary of the history of the Dictionnaire philosophique can be found here: and a thorough summary can be found in Beuchot's preface to the 1829 publication of the complete works of Voltaire. Beuchot mentions that of all the articles now in the Dictionnaire philosophique, he could date all but about 40. He believed that these undated articles were all or mostly from the lost manuscript known as Opinion sur l'alphabet.

The Questions sur l'Encyclopédie can be found online:. It contains a number of the quotes which, as you had cited above, are not found in the Dictionnaire philosophique portatif. Of the 20 quotes from the Dictionnaire currently on the Wikiquote Voltaire page, I have now been able to provide dates for all but three. This is based on Beuchot's dates provided in the online Dictionnaire philosophique as well as the ones you had found in your sources. These quotes will thus be subdivided in Wikiquote as belonging to one of the three categories listed above. The Dictionnaire philosophique portatif quotations can all be dated back to 1764 or 1765. Some of the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie quotations have been dated by Beuchot to 1770 and 1771. The remaining Questions sur l'Encyclopédie quotations can be roughly dated from its publication dates of 1770-1774. This leaves the so-far undated three quotations (from the articles Civil and Ecclesiatic Laws, Liberty of the Press and Power/Omnipotence). These undated quotes, since no earlier source has been found for them, would be placed in the category of the Dictionnaire philosophique (i.e, the posthumous Kehl edition) and dated as such. In the case of one of the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie quotes, the previously discussed "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," I am going to transfer it to La Bégueule for reasons also discussed above. InvisibleSun 05:58, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

 * Thank you for the detailed analysis and investigation!
 * I've tracked down the Italian original from the footnote; earliest attestation I could find was 1603 (!), in the form Il meglio è nemico del bene, in Proverbi italiani [Italian Proverbs], by Orlando Pescetti (c. 1556 – c. 1624) (p. 30, p. 45)
 * —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 06:07, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

 * For reference, there's a Google Answers thread on this, with essentially the same attribution, and further references: quotation from Voltaire
 * —Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 06:36, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Translations
Some translation suggestions I have in skimming through a few of the quotes:
 * Le paradis terrestre est où je suis.
 * I am in earthly heaven.
 * Qui plume a, guerre a.
 * He who has pen, has war.
 * He who has pen, has war.

Notes: I don't know if the translations in the article are "official" or not, so I'm not sure if this post has any meaning. I also did not go through the whole list...these are only a few that have caught my eye so far. Setjw 23:21, 12 April 2006 (UTC) Some of the translations have been in use for a long time; but I wouldn't consider them official all the same. Most of the quotations had not included the original French. Many of them had been placed, without sources, in the Attributed section. I then set about working on several tasks: 1) finding sources for as many of the attributed quotes as I could, placing the results in either the Sourced or Misattributed sections; 2) reviewing quotes already listed as Sourced to see if any corrections needed to be made; and 3) providing the original French for as many of the quotes as I could find. Whenever I thought that  translations strayed far from the original or resulted in a questionable meaning, I changed them.  One of the reasons I wanted to provide the French was to let us judge for ourselves as to accuracy of translation as well as skill in phrasing. This means that of the translations on the page, some are traditional, some are my own, and some are a bit of each. So there's nothing really official about the translations; nor is there reason for anyone to hold back on making corrections.  If I could presume to give opinions or advice on your suggestions, I would say:  1) "Qui plume a, guerre a" is difficult to translate into English, which is why I had settled for its standard translation. Your translation comes closer to the original phrasing. I would propose adding the indefinite articles, i.e., "Whoever has a pen, has a war." It would sound more natural, I think, to say it that way. 2) As for the other quote you mentioned, I would suggest that it alters the meaning to say "I am in earthly heaven." The meaning as I see it is that Paradise is something I take with me wherever I go.  In the original it is the last line of a poem, Le Mondain :  C’est bien en vain que, par l’orgueil séduits, Huet, Calmet, dans leur savante audace, Du paradis ont recherché la place: Le paradis terrestre est où je suis.  Preserving the original ten syllables of each line, I would translate it as this:  It is quite in vain that, seduced by pride, Huet and Calmet, in learned boldness, Have discovered the site of Paradise: For paradise on earth is where I am.  This context shows better what Voltaire was saying; since only the final line, however, is the one that is quotable, I would eliminate the "For" and simply say: "Paradise on earth is where I am." What would be your opinion on that? My apologies for writing at such length. InvisibleSun 03:09, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

I was unaware of the context of the second quote, so I agree with your translation of it. Maybe if I had looked up the source of the quote I would have not been so...critical, I suppose. Anyways, I like your translation because it gives it a sense of "poesie"... As for the other quote, I definitely agree that it is very difficult to translate. I don't think any English translation will ever fit the harshness/punctual effect the words have. Maybe it's a question of opinion, but I consider "Whoever has a pen, has a war" a little "soft", if you know what I mean. I agree it sounds more natural, but Voltaire's "inversions" provide an un-natural feel to the text. What do you think? Maybe we should look for some less "literal" translations (i.e. your "to hold", which is not in the original quote). A final note, thanks so much for the work you've done! And don't worry about the length of your responses =)... Setjw 14:04, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Voltaire's views on race
''A WP user transwikied a page of quotes to Wikisource improperly without doing anything to preserve edit history. I feel they should be transwikied here before I delete them but it is a mess with no translator info and unknown copright status. I do not want to dump this on your page, nor do I wany anythin potentially useful to be lost. So I hope that you do not mind if I dump it on your talk page here. Hopefully this is an acceptable compromise. If anyone has a dual admin at en.WP the above heading was the name of the article and you should be able to extract the edit history if you need it. s:User:BirgitteSB--71.81.70.212 18:08, 3 December 2006 (UTC)''

Voltaire's views on race were mostly expressed in his work Essai sur les mœurs.
 * The Voltaire article on WP has been on my watchlist for a long while. Observing all the controversy on this subject in that article, I knew that it would be just a matter of time before it showed up here as well.  With Voltaire as part of my watchlist here, I've been working, among other things, on incorporating all new entries for sourcing, placing in  chronological order, finding and including the original French, etc.  So I'll work on this also, but not adding all of it by any means: the sheer volume of the quotes is highly redundant and disproportionate to the total quotes on the page.  It's disproportionate as well in that this particular subject was only a fraction of Voltaire's concerns in general.  I'll select those quotes which express themselves the most succinctly and essentially, which will suffice. It's been a problem  with transwikied quotes, as I've sometimes noticed, that they are given to just this sort of massive redundancy, exhaustively quoting everything that can be found on one particular subject.  On Wikiquote, however, we realize it's bad for an article to quote the same opinions over and again just because someone had in fact said them all.  It's overkill in every sense: it harms the articles, making them obsessive and disproportionate on particular subjects; and it's pointless, since there's no need to make the same points many times.  - InvisibleSun 18:43, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Black people
Voltaire held that Black people, whom he called "animals", were a peculiar species of human because of what he perceived as great differences from other humans, both physically and mentally:

I see monkeys, elephants, negroes, who all seem to have some gleam of an imperfect reason. They have a language that I do not hear, and all their actions appear to also refer to a certain end. If I judged things by the first effect they make on me, I would have the leaning one to believe that of all these beings it is the elephant which is the reasonable animal. —Voltaire, Traité de Métaphysique>> (1734)

I thus suppose myself arrived to Africa, surrounded by negroes, Hottentots, and other animals. —Voltaire, Traité de Métaphysique (1734)

What I met of different in the negroes animals? (…) their feeling and thinking faculty grows with their bodies, and weakens with them, perishes with them. That we pours the blood of a monkey and a negro, there will be soon in one and the other a degree of exhaustion which will put them out of state to recognize me; soon after their external directions do not act any more, and finally they die. Finally I see men who appear superior to me than these negroes, as these negros are it with the monkeys, and as the monkeys are it with oysters and other animals of this species. —Voltaire, Traité de Métaphysique (1734)

Their round eyes, their flat nose, theirs lips always thick, their differently-shaped ears, the wool of their head, the measure itself of their intelligence, puts between them and other species of human prodigious differences. And that which shows that they do not owe this difference to their climate, it is that Negroes, transported in the coldest countries, there produce animals of their species, and that the mulattos are only a bastard race of a Black man and of a White woman, or of a White man and of a Black woman. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 1, page 7

It is not improbable that in the hot countries monkeys subjugated girls. Herodotus, in the Book II, said that during his trip in Egypt there was a woman who publicly coupled herself whith a goat in the province of Mendès (...) It is thus necessary that these couplings were common; and until one is better cleared up, it is to be supposed that monsterous species have been born from these abominable loves. But if they existed, they could not influence mankind; and, similar to the mules, who do not generate, they could not denature the other races. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 1, page 8

The same providence which produced the elephant, the rhinoceros and Negroes, gave birth in another world to moose, condors, animals who believed a long time they have the navel on the back, and men of a character which is not ours. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 1, page 38

Whites, negroes, reds, Lapps, Samoyèdes and Albinos, do not certainly come from the same ground. The difference between all these species is also marked than a greyhound and a barbet spaniel; there is thus just a slab badly informed and heading who can claim that all the men go down from the Indian Adimo and his wife. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 2, page 49

We looked a them in the same eye that we see the Negroes, like a lower species of men. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756)

The nature subordinated to this principle these various degrees and these characters of the nations, that we seldom sees change. It is by there that the Negroes are the slaves of the other men. We buy them on the coasts of Africa like animals. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756)

The race of the Negroes is a species of men different from ours … we can say that if their intelligence is not from another species of our understanding, she is much lower. They are not able of a great attention, they combine little and do not appear made nor for the advantages, nor for the abuses of our philosophy. They are originate from this part of Africa like the elephants and the monkeys; they think they are born in Guinea to be sold to the whites and to serve them. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 16, pages 269–270

He also wrote of the culture of Native Americans:

All the rest of this vast continent [of America] was shared, and still is, by small societies to whom the arts are unknown. All these peoples live in huts; they wear the skin of animals in cold climates, and go nearly naked in the temperate ones. Some feed from hunting, others on roots that they knead. They have not seeked another way of life, because one does not desire that which one does not know. Their industry has been unable to go beyond their urgent needs. Samoyèdes, Lapps, habitants of the north of Siberia, those of Kamtschatka, are even less advanced than the people of the America. Most of the Negroes, all Kaffirs, are plunged in the same stupidity, and they will stagnate a long time. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 1, page 11

Voltaire expressed much the same views in his personal correspondence:

It is a serious question among them whether [the Africans] are descended from monkeys or whether the monkeys come from them. Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the Divine Maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence. A time will doubtless come when these animals will know how to cultivate the land well, beautify their houses and gardens, and know the paths of the stars: one needs time for everything.[1] —Voltaire, Lettres d'Annabed

Jews
If we read the history of the Jews written by an author of another nation, we would have sorrow to believe that there were indeed fugitive people of Egypt which came by express order from God immoler seven or eight small nations that they didn't know; to cut the throat without mercy of a woman, old men and children with the udder, and to reserve only the small girls; that these holy people were punished of his God when it had been enough criminal to save only one man devoted to the anathema. We would not believe that so abominable people (Jews) had been able to exist on the earth. But as this nation itself brings back all its facts in its holy books to us, it should be believed. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 1, pages 158–159

[The Jewish nation] dares spread an irreconcilable hatred against all nations; it revolts against all its masters. Always superstitious, always avid of the well-being enjoyed by others, always barbarous, crawling in misfortune, and insolent in prosperity. Here are what were the Jews in the eyes of the Greeks and the Romans who could read their books. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 1, page 186

If these Ismaélites (Arabs) resembled to the Jews by the enthusiasm and the thirst for plundering, they were prodigiously higher by courage, by the nobility of soul, by the magnanimity: their history, or true or fabulous, before Mahomet, is filled of examples of friendship, such as Greece invented some in the fables of Pilade and Oreste, of Thésée and Pirithous. The history of Barmécides is only one continuation of amazing generosities which raise the heart. These features characterize a nation. We do not see on the contrary, in all annals of the Hebrew people, no generous action. They do not know nor hospitality, nor liberality, nor leniency. Their sovereign happiness is to exert wear with the foreigners; and this spirit of wear, principle of any cowardice, is so natural in their hearts, that it is the continual object of the figures that they employ in the species of eloquence which is proper for them. Their glory is to put at fire and blood the small villages they can seize. They cut the throat of the old men and the children; they hold only the girls nubiles; they assassinate their Masters when they are slaves; they can never forgive when they are victorious: they are enemy of the human mankind. No courtesy, no science, no art improved in any time, in this atrocious nation. —Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs (1756) Tome 2, page 83

You seem to me to be the maddest of the lot. The Kaffirs, the Hottentots, and the Negroes of Guinea are much more reasonable and more honest people than your ancestors, the Jews. You have surpassed all nations in impertinent fables in bad conduct and in barbarism. You deserve to be punished, for this is your destiny.[2] —Voltaire, From a letter to a Jew who had written to him, complaining of his antisemitism in L'Essai sur le Moeurs

… [Jews] are, all of them, born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair. I would not be in the least bit surprised if these people would not some day become deadly to the human race.[2] —Voltaire, Lettres de Memmius a Ciceron (1771)

I know that there are some Jews in the English colonies. These marranos go wherever there is money to be made... But whether these circumcised who sell old clothes claim that they are of the tribe of Naphtali or Issachar is not of the slightest importance. They are, simply, the biggest scoundrels who have ever dirtied the face of the earth." —Voltaire, Letter to Jean-Baptiste Nicolas de Lisle de Sales, December 15, 1773. Correspondance. 86:166

 * 18th Century Racism - retrieved on 20 October 2006.
 * Hertzberg, Arthur (24 October 1968). The New York Review of Books: THE CHOSEN PEOPLE - retrieved on 21 October 2006.

 * None of these quotes support a charge of "virulent anti-semitism": that strikes me as an almost hysterical exaggeration. Anti-Jewish prejudice, perhaps.  Anti-Judaism, certainly.  But a lot of this material refers to the stories told in the Hebrew Bible, which any philosophe would have regarded with distaste if not disgust.

 * What is more, Voltaire wrote admiringly of "The Extraordinary Tolerance of the Jews" in his 1763 Treatise on Tolerance. In the recent Cambridge translation, for example we find the following: "In a word, if one is to examine Judaism closely, one will be surprised to find, in the midst of barbaric horrors, a most extraordinary spirit of tolerance.  Yes, it is a paradox, but nearly all people have been governed by some measure of contradiction; happy are those whose society is gentle though their laws be bloody." (p. 63)

 * This is hardly the sort of thing a "virulent anti-semite" would have written.--Cliodule 16:44, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

I've removed this original apology from the main page "Note: Despite the apparent antisemitic sentiment in this quote, Voltaire wrote much that attacked hatred of the Jews. He considered all of "antiquity" to share the qualities he lists above as belonging to the Jewish people, and is not attempting to insult all Jews." That Voltaire attacked hatred of Jews shows nothing about his position on Jews themselves. If he considered the conduct of Jews a mere 'sign of the times', then let him say so. With the option to generalize he doesn't, so let his words stand faithfully for each to discern their proper context.Aero13792468 01:26, 5 March 2011 (UTC)

In my earlier response to s:User:BirgitteSB, I had mentioned that I would add some of the above transwikied quotes to this article. Now that I have begun to do this, I have discovered that these translations are so poor as to be unusable. Examples: What I met of different in the negroes animals? There is thus just a slab badly informed and heading who can claim that all the men go down from the Indian Adimo and his wife. Their sovereign happiness is to exert wear with the foreigners. Finally I see men who appear superior to me than these negroes, as these negros are it with the monkeys, and as the monkeys are it with oysters and other animals of this species. And so on. I have therefore followed the link provided by this user for 18th Century Racism and have found better translations. I then chose three of these quotations as being all that an article this size would need or could justify proportionally. Finally, I found the original French for these quotes and provided links to the text sources. - InvisibleSun 08:48, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

Voltaire's pessimistic quote
The one where he admits happiness is but a dream?
 * "Happiness is but a dream and sorrow is real." [Le bonheur n'est qu'un rêve et la douleur est réelle.] - Voltaire, letter to M. le marquis de Florian, Verney (16 March 1774), from Oeuvres Complètes de Voltaire: Correspondance [Garnier frères, Paris, 1882, ed. Georges Bengesco], vol. XVI, letter # 9067 (p. 583) - InvisibleSun 23:08, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

"History is the lie commonly agreed upon."
This is very similar to another quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. 76.215.192.143 20:33, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I was thinking of moving the quote from Unsourced to Misattributed; but since the attribution to Napoleon is also uncertain, I decided to leave it as an Unsourced quote on the Voltaire page. It does, however, resemble the following Sourced quote on the Napoleon page (see under Memoirs of Napoleon): "What then is, generally speaking, the truth of history ? A fable agreed upon." - InvisibleSun 20:42, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Here is another one found on the net: "The Best Way to Be Boring is to Leave Nothing Out" - is this really Voltaire? --193.157.188.77 09:46, 26 February 2008 (UTC)
 * It's already on the Voltaire page: *Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire. ** The secret of being a bore is to tell everything. **           "Sixième discours: sur la nature de l'homme," Sept Discours en Vers sur l'Homme (1738) - InvisibleSun 14:11, 26 February 2008 (UTC)

Ice-Cream
I have seen this quote attributed to Voltaire on several websites: "Ice-cream is exquisite. What a pity it isn't illegal." Anyone know where it is from? == Answer : the sentence does not exist in French (no reported written sources). It seems to be a English pseudo-quote, spreading from a fake/joke into the internet. ==

Seduction
Got this quote: "Give me 10 minutes to talk away my ugly face and I'll bed the Queen of France", but no idea wheter it really is Voltaire. Would like to see the context, though.

Unsourced

 * Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

 * To enjoy life, we must touch much of it lightly.

 * Doctors are men who pour drugs of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, into human beings of whom they know nothing.

 * God created sex. Priests created marriage.

 * History is the lie commonly agreed upon.

 * I decided to be happy, it is excellent for one's health.
 * Original: J'ai décidé d'être heureux, c'est excellent pour la santé.

 * I was only abused by lawyers twice in my life — once when I was sued by one and once when I hired one.

 * If you see a Swiss banker jumping out of a window, follow him, there is sure to be a profit in it.

 * Is it any wonder that there are atheists in the world, when the church behaves so abominably?

 * Marriage is the only adventure open to the cowardly.

 * No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.

 * Now is no time to be making new enemies.
 * When asked on his deathbed by a priest to renounce the devil and turn to God.

 * Prejudices are what fools use for reason.

 * The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the diseases.

 * The man who leaves money to charity in his will is only giving away what no longer belongs to him.
 * Source: Letter

 * The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

 * The perfect form of government is democracy tempered by assassination.

 * Think for yourselves, and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too.
 * Source reputed to be the Essay on Tolerance, but not found there
 * I have found "The Works of M. de Voltaire: Miscellanies in history, literature and philosophy" (1762) original edition (p. 114) -- Indeed, "On Toleration" essay title.

 * To succeed in the world it is not enough to be stupid; you must also be well-mannered.

no time to make new enemies
apparently Voltaire said "This is no time to make new enemies." when asked on his deathbed to forswear Satan.

i assume this is myth but does anyone know when it came about? it would be good to add it in wikiquotes.

My understanding is this was said by Machiavelli. Considering Voltaire was the same kind of guy, it's possible the quote has been attributed to him. But I'm searching for documentation attributing it to Machiavelli.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/13/no-enemies/

"Cherish those who seek the truth but beware of those who find it."
This quote is frequently attributed to Voltaire, but I couldn't find any mention of it here. It would be nice to now if it's a real quote or misattribution. 69.143.176.65
 * This one is by André Gide: "Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent". --Omnipaedista (talk) 03:17, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

The most courageous decision you make each day is the decision to be in a good mood
Attributed to Voltaire (very sharp quote), very quoted, but I have never seen the precise location of this quote.

Re: the above, the oldest (c. 2001) example I can find is in this file, which appears to be an excerpt from Teaching for Excellence by Robert E. Glenn:. I also find lots of later examples with the word "courageous" changed to "important". Szarka (talk) 16:52, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

 * Google Books helped track this 1993 instance:
 * Wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be a paraphrase or reinterpretation along the lines of this one of Marcus Aurelius:
 * See also this discussion of "Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats", also attributed to Voltaire but sourced to a history professor discussing the message of Candide: RZiman (talk) 00:17, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

 * Note also this passage from Chapter 24 of Candide (Candide and other stories: A new translation by Roger Pearson, World's Classics by Oxford University Press, 1990):
 * ‘But,’ Candide said to Paquette, ‘you were looking so gay, so happy, when I ran into you. You were singing, you were fondling the Theatine quite naturally and willingly. You seemed to me every bit as happy as you say you are unhappy.’ ‘Ah, sir,’ replied Paquette, ‘that’s another of the awful things about our profession. Yesterday I was robbed and beaten by an officer, and today I have to appear to be in a good mood just to please a monk.’
 * How utterly ironic -- and apt -- if the paraphrase was of something Voltaire put into the mouth of a prostitute. RZiman (talk) 01:26, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

"I must die, abandoned of God and of man."
Hello there. This one is a quote that some people on the net claim Voltaire made at his deathbed. I want to know whether that is true or false, because I've seen that people have different versions about his last words. Robert E. Lucas, for instance, claims that he said "Now is no time to be making new enemies". Thanks in advance. --Goose friend (talk) 07:01, 18 August 2013 (UTC)
 * It depends on whom you believe. In Explication du Catéchisme (1821), it is claimed that Voltaire cried, Je suis donc abandonné de Dieu et des hommes! on his deathbed, but I for one find it very hard to take these accounts given by Christians seriously. Take the following passage, this time from 2001 (J. Phillips, Exploring Psalms, Vol. I, p. 33) —
 * For two long months the wretched man [Voltaire] was tormented with such agony of soul that he was seen to gnash his teeth in rage against God and man. At other times he would whimper like a kitten. He would turn his face to the wall and cry out: "I must die—abandoned of God and of men." As his end drew near, his spiritual condition became so frightful that his unbelieving friends feared to approach his bed, but still they mounted their guard so that others might not see how dreadful was the end of an infidel.
 * A GoogleBooks search for "I must die—abandoned of God and of men" gives several hits (e.g., one from a jornal of 1880, The Christian Foundation, &c.), but predictably only from Christian publications.
 * The story where Voltaire says (when asked to renounce Satan) "This is no time to make new enemies" sounds more plausible, to the non-believers at any rate, but it is equally open to question. Incidentally, this is why atheist Richard Dawkins wants to have, on his deathbed, a tape recorder switched on. As Bertrand Russell put it, referring to deathbed conversions, Religious people, most of them, think that it's a virtuous act to tell lies about the deathbeds of agnostics and such. As a matter of fact, it doesn't happen very often. ~ DanielTom (talk) 12:38, 18 August 2013 (UTC)

 * It sounds more like an urban myth.
 * I just seek the truth. Voltaire saying "Je meurs en adorant Dieu, en aimant mes amis, en ne haïssant pas mes ennemis et en détestant la superstition"[1 ] sounds indeed more real if one takes into account what Voltaire himself wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, rejecting the Catholic church, but telling to Jesus "I take you for my only master."[1 ]

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Current entry is: Le doute n'est pas une condition agréable, mais la certitude est absurde. Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is [an] absurd [one]. Letter to Frederick II of Prussia (6 April 1767).

The French original is incorrect as is the attribution. I take my evidence from:

Letter to Frederick William, Prince of Prussia, 1770 Nov 28. In S.G. Tallentyre (ed.), Voltaire in His Letters. New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1919. p.232

A Frédéric-Guillaume. In Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Tome Trente-Troisième; edition de Ch. Lahure et Cie. Paris : Librairie de L. Hachetteet Cie. 1861. p.291

Au prince royal de prusse, le 28 novembre. In Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, Tome Dixième. Paris : Chez Furne. 1836. p. 522.

Au prince royal de prusse, 28 novembre. In M. Palissot (ed.), Oeuvres de Voltaire: Lettres Choisies du Roi de Prusse et de M. de Voltaire, Tome II. Paris : Chez Baudoiun. 1802. p. 419.

Unfortunately, both these errors are repeated often on the web and in books. The given French statement appears to be a back translation into French from a popular English translation of Voltaire's original statement. The original French is: Le doute n'est pas une état bien agréable, mais l'assurance est un état ridicule.

Belastro (talk) 03:50, 5 September 2013 (UTC)

"A few acres of snow"
"You know that these two nations are at war about a few acres of snow somewhere around Canada, and that they are spending on this beautiful war more than all Canada is worth."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_few_acres_of_snow

"not allowed to criticize" misattributed quote
I don't know where it came from originally. I first heard a version around 2005 from a mainstream media outlet which allegedly was from a reporter who had been stationed all over the world and spoke from experience (he was referring to some Arab country, I believe). I did an internet search of the quote and the year 2010 and easily found this on reddit from 2010, allegedly from Voltaire. Similarly this quote used in 2009. I also found it on a feminist site critical of one form of what they consider patriarchal behavior here. (Have searched for reporter quote but not found either.)

So let's not damn the quote because one bad actor used it. Now maybe there is some variation from Voltaire. I tried a few variations in books google but didn't find anything relevant. It would be nice to pin it down. Carolmooredc (talk) 19:32, 15 October 2013 (UTC)

 * It originally came from Kevin Strom in 1993 http://www.amfirstbooks.com/IntroPages/ToolBarTopics/Articles/Featured_Authors/strom,_kevin/kevin_strom_works/Kevin_Strom_1991-1994/Kevin_A._Strom_19930814-ADV_All_America_Must_Know_the_Terror_That_Is_Upon_Us.html The sites you linked to are just misattributing it to Voltaire. Drsmoo (talk) 00:21, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Also, I must point out that that feminist site is really run by a TERF and makes comments according to that outlook. Frankly, I don't have (to put it very mildly) much love for TERFs, I find them very toxic, so I'm amused by the irony and find the (albeit most probably completely inadvertent) indirect reference to a Neo-Nazi meme highly apropos. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:10, 24 March 2016 (UTC)

New quote about doctors
Today I have found a quote supposedly by Voltaire: "Doctors are men who prescribe medicine of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, for human beings of which they know nothing." I can't verify this one. It appears on many websites, but none of them reveals the source. If it is misattributed, it should be mentioned in the section. (sorry for my bad english, I didn't use it much in the past 2 years) --87.79.176.165 16:07, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

 * This attribution to Voltaire appears in Strauss' Familiar Medical Quotations (1968), p. 394, and in publications as early as 1956 . In trying to find the original in French, I came across the following: "Les médecins administrent des médicaments dont ils savent très peu, à des malades dont ils savent moins, pour guérir des maladies dont ils ne savent rien.", which is also often quoted and attributed to Voltaire, but only in rather recent publications, which leads me to think Voltaire never did write it. I will add this to the main article under "Attributed" if no one opposes, though. Thanks for your comment. ~ DanielTom (talk) 16:53, 15 January 2014 (UTC)

Voltaire's House and The Bible Society (revisited)
I am David Ross, the author of the Open Society article (written in 2004) that has been referenced here regarding the anecdote that Voltaire claimed the Bible would become a forgotten book, but after his death his house was converted into a Bible Society headquarters. My article needs revising and updating to take into account new evidence that has since come to light thanks to Google Books. In the Missionary Register of 1836 (p.352) we find Rev. William Acworth (1803-99) reporting that Voltaire's mansion in Geneva ("Les Delices") was apparently being used by an unnamed member of the Geneva Evangelical Society. This needs further investigation. Of course, Les Delices is today the Voltaire Institute & Museum, not a Bible Society headquarters. 27.252.190.135 23:39, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

There are truths which are not for all men, nor for all times
「Il y a des vérités qui ne sont pas pour tous les hommes et pour tous les temps.」

See Œuvres complètes de Voltaire avec des notes et une notice ..., Volume 2.

That shows the year as 1764, not 1761. See also http://www.bartleby.com/344/170.html

—Sideshowbarker (talk) 09:04, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value -zero."
What do you think of this quote?

It's found on the internet here and there but not on Wikiquote.

So did Voltaire actually say something like this? --JamesPoulson (talk) 01:45, 14 December 2019 (UTC)

A Quotation about Questions and Answers
Here's one quotation attributed to Voltaire that I found at a local shop:

"Judge a Man by his Questions rather than his Answers." (Or something along that line)

What does anyone here think? --Apisite (talk) 23:24, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Voltaire