“D’Holbach’s book caused a great stir among the Paris savants, effectively dividing the deists from the atheists. Voltaire, committed to deism and long impatient with d’Holbach’s declamatory ways, called it ‘a chaos, a great moral sickness, a work of darkness, a sin against nature, a system of folly and ignorance.’ He wrote to Delisle de Sales: “I think that nothing has debased our century more than this enormous stupidity.”

— Rebecca Stott (2013), Darwin’s Ghosts: in Search of the First Evolutionists [9]

At Café Procope (circa 1750): showing (Ѻ): Marquis Condorcet, Jean-Francois de La Harpe, Voltaire, with his arm raised, the central epicenter genius, and Denis Diderot, Father Adam, his personal priest (Ѻ), whom he played chess with.

“In his book Letters of the English, Voltaire relates that during his stay in England, in 1727, he overheard some learned men discussing the question: who was the greatest man—Caesar, Alexander, Tamerlane, or Cromwell? One speaker maintained that Newton was beyond a doubt the greatest man. Voltaire agreed with this judgment, per the following reasoning:

‘It is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.”

Whether Voltaire was truly convinced that Newton was the greatest man who ever lived or was simply trying to make a philosophical point, the anecdote raises an interesting question: of the billions of human beings who have populated the earth, which persons have most influenced the course of history? This book is solely involved with the question of who were the 100 persons who had the greatest effect on history and on the course of the world. I have ranked these 100 persons in order of importance: that is, according to the total amount of influence that each of them had on human history and on the everyday lives of other human beings.”

Voltaire and Frederick the Great in the study at Sans Souci; engraving by P.C. Baquoy after N.A. Monsiau.

“I am the town of two simple citizens, Boerhaave and Gravesande attract from four to five hundred strangers.”

See main: Voltaire on religion

“I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often. ... If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

“I had a veritable mania for finishing whatever I began, which often got me into difficulties. On one occasion I started to read the works of Voltaire when I learned, to my dismay, that there were close on one hundred large volumes in small print which that monster had written while drinking seventy-two cups of black coffee per diem. It had to be done, but when I laid aside the last book I was very glad, and said, ‘Never more!’”

“I have been the more particular in stating the immense obligations history is under to Voltaire, because, in England there exists against him a prejudice, which nothing but ignorance, or something worse than ignorance, can excuse and because, taking him on the whole, he is probably the greatest historian Europe has yet produced. The vast labors of Voltaire towards reforming the old method of writing history, were greatly aided by those important works which Montesquieu put forward during the same period. In 1734, Montesquieu published what may be truly called the first book in which there can be found any information concerning the real history of Rome; because it is also the first in which the affairs of the ancient world are treated in a large and comprehensive spirit.”

— Henry Buckle (1856), History of Civilization, Volume One (pgs. 591-92)

“Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat.”

— John Morley (1872), Voltaire [10]

“There is a significance in the fact that it is actually the hundredth anniversary of the death of Voltaire (1878) with which Human, All Too Human, as it were, apologizes for being published. Voltaire is, in contrast to all who have written after him, above all a grandseigneur (Ѻ) of the spirit: precisely what I am too.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche (1888), Ecce Homo (pg. 59)

“God if reason, the Bible is Newtonian physics; and the prophet is Voltaire.”

— Anon (c.1900), summarized by Ching-Yao Hsieh [4]

“Several are well above the 200 IQ mark. Arnauld, Comte, Goethe, Grotius, Laplace, Leopardi, Michelangelo, Newton, Pascal, the younger Pitt, Sarpi, Shelling, Voltaire and Wolsey probably rated at 200 IQ or even higher. A group containing Voltaire must approach or perhaps exceed a score of 200”

— Catherine Cox (1926), Early Mental Traits of 300 Geniuses [6]

“Pascal and Voltaire both probably had IQs in the neighborhood of 200.”

— Paul Popenoe (1927), “The Childhood of Genius: A Review” [7]

“Oh Plato, so much admired! I fear that you have told us only fables, and have never spoken except in sophisms. Oh Plato! You have done more harm than you know. How so? I shall be asked, but I shall not answer?”

— Voltaire (c.1755), Publication; cited by Arthur Lovejoy (1933) in The Great Chain of Being (pg. 253)

“Why should, and how can, existence be infinite? Newton demonstrated the reality of the vacuum. If in nature there can be a void beyond nature, wherein lies the necessity that entities should extend to infinity? What would an infinite extension be? It could no more exist that an infinite number.”

— Voltaire (c.1755), Publication; cited by Arthur Lovejoy (1933) in The Great Chain of Being (pg. 253)

“The chain is not an absolute plenum. It is demonstrated that the heavenly bodies perform their revolutions in a non-resistant space. Not all space is filled. There is not, therefore, a series (suite) of bodies from an atom to the most remote of the stars; there can therefore be immense intervals between sensible beings, as well as between insensible ones. We cannot, then, be sure that man is necessarily placed in one of the links which are attached one to another in an unbroken sequence.”

— Voltaire (1756), “personal note”; cited by Arthur Lovejoy (1933) in The Great Chain of Being (pg. 363)

“If all the geniuses of the universe were assembled, Newton should lead the band.”

— Voltaire (c.1760)

“Every man is the creature of the age in which he lives; very few are able to raise themselves above the ideas of the time.”

— Voltaire (c.1760)

“A clergyman is one who feels himself called upon to live without work at the expense of the rascals who work to live.”

— Voltare (c.1760) in FSM app

“The question of good and evil remain in remediless chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is a mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains.”

— Voltaire (c.1765) (Ѻ) cited by Jennifer Hecht (2003) in Doubt: a History (pg. 345)