Politics & Power Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire lands the knife with a smile: take the Enlightenment's prized slogan, "democracy", then add a condiment so barbaric it cancels any self-congratulation. The line works because it refuses to let political ideals stay clean. "Tempered" is the tell - a word from metallurgy and cooking, suggesting restraint, balance, refinement. Then comes "assassination", the crude heat that hardens the blade. He stages a collision between the salon's rational optimism and the street-level truth that power rarely yields without fear.

The intent isn't to endorse murder as policy; it's to mock the fantasy that good governance can be engineered solely through procedure and virtue. Voltaire is needling the complacent believer in systems: elections, assemblies, constitutions. In practice, he implies, elites entrench themselves, demagogues emerge, and "the people" becomes a rhetorical costume. The violent word is there to puncture the pieties and remind you that political legitimacy has always been underwritten by coercion, whether it's the state doing it "legally" or citizens doing it illegally.

Context matters: Voltaire wrote in a Europe of monarchs, censors, and prisons, where speech could be punished and reform arrived slowly, if at all. For an intellectual constantly negotiating with authority, assassination becomes a dark joke about accountability when institutions are designed to protect the powerful. The subtext is bleakly modern: if democracy can't discipline its own predators, someone else will - and it won't be polite.