Yep, a post devoted to some quotes from the man who said “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” and was also the most suppressed author of the 18th century. In his lifetime, he was arrested for his writing, many of his books were banned and some were burned.

Voltaire’s death hasn’t made him less controversial: In 1929, Boston authorities seized copies of Candide on their way to Harvard and the Post Office, in 1944, would not allow a mail-order catalog to list a copy. A few years ago, a play about Mohammed was banned in Geneva in response to Muslim protests.

Without further ado, the quotes:

“God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.”

“All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.”

“Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

“Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.”

“The safest course is to do nothing against one’s conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death.”

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.”

“Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.”

And for pure snark: “All I have asked of God is that he make my enemies ridiculous—and behold, he has granted my wish.”

“sometimes it all seems like squealing car tires with no crash at the end” — From ”Let’s move all things (September),” by Denver Butson
(Today is actually going fine, but I know the feeling he’s talking about).

“Everything we do is futile, but we must do it anyway.”—Mahatma Gandhi.

“The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for decades surely stands in a lonely place.”—Gary Zukav

“I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector.”—William Stafford.

“The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”—Winston Churchill.

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass. The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! The second tear makes kitsch kitsch.” —Milan Kundera

In a 2006 questionnaire by the right-wing Eagle Forum for gubernatorial candidates:

11. Are you offended by the phrase “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I’ll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

Apparently Palin wasn’t aware that by the time the pledge was drafted in the late 19th century — let alone when “under God” was added in the fifties — the Founding Fathers were, well, dead.

“People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”—Bill Clinton

From writer G. Willow Wilson: “Art is by nature and most artists are extremists … I’m also an extremist—-I simply choose the other extreme. And at a time when artists of all sorts are allowed and even expected to do the stuff everyone else just wishes they could get away with, my extreme feels almost naughty. Antiestablishment. Aberrant. I like being a chemical-free, overdisciplined ball of morning-person enthusiasm.”

“Riveted”
Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious dénouement
to the unsurprising end - riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

Courtesy of except in dreams .

From “True Love” by Wislawa Szymborska

“True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life’s highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn’t populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there’s no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.”

“I asked him what it’s like to be dead,
the guy said, fumbling a face-down card,
and he said it’s not a place, heaven,
it’s a feeling, the feeling of knowing
everything you never knew.”—”Something Else,” Christian Barter.

“If we are not totally blind, what we are seeking is already here. This is it.”—Alan Watts

“The capacity of the mind is broad and huge, like the vast sky. Do not sit with a mind fixed on emptiness. If you do, you will fall into a neutral kind of emptiness.”—Hui-neng

“Every place is under the stars, every place is of the world.”—John Burroughs

“Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”—Erich Fromm