Wit & Attitude Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s line lands like a silk-gloved slap: it’s not just a joke about bad lyrics, it’s a diagnosis of how culture launders nonsense. Sung words get a kind of diplomatic immunity. Melody softens scrutiny; repetition turns weak ideas into shared furniture; emotion fills in the gaps where meaning should be. What would sound absurd in plain speech can pass, even thrive, once it’s carried on a tune and delivered as feeling rather than argument.

The intent is characteristically Voltairean: puncture pretension, expose the tricks institutions use to smuggle dogma, and remind you that people are easier to move than to convince. His real target isn’t music as an art form but the social function of performance. In the 18th century, opera and song weren’t niche entertainment; they were mass media for elites, a glamorous public stage where political allegory, moral instruction, and fashionable sentiment could circulate with plausible deniability. If you can’t defend it at a salon table, you can still sell it at the theater.

The subtext is cynical but not nihilistic: rational discourse is fragile, and the public sphere is porous. Voltaire implies that taste can be weaponized, that beauty can be a delivery system for stupidity. It’s also an early warning about what we’d now call virality: once a phrase becomes singable, it becomes memorable, and once it’s memorable, it starts to feel true.