Voltaire, n.Definitions

Voltaire is a man who to name is to characterize the whole eighteenth century.

Voltaire was, for his country, both Renaissance and Reformation, and half the Revolution.

Voltaire is the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.

Voltaire carried on the antiseptic skepticism of Montaigne, and the healthy earthy humor of Rabelais, who fought superstition and corruption more savagely than Luther or Erasmus, Calvin or Knox or Melanchthon; and who helped to make the powder with which Mirabeau and Marat, Danton and Robespierre blew up the Old Regime.

Voltaire is the originator of the word 'optimism', which he coined in mockery of Leibniz, who believed he had demonstrated that we live in the best of possible worlds.

Voltaire is the cleverest of all past and present men; but a great man is something more, and this he surely was not.