Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s line is a scalpel disguised as a proverb: it treats mass violence not as a sudden moral collapse, but as the logical end of bad ideas taken seriously. The key move is the pairing of “absurdities” with “atrocities,” a rhyme in thought if not in sound. He’s arguing that cruelty rarely arrives announcing itself as cruelty. It comes wearing the respectable uniform of unquestioned belief: a theology, a superstition, a tribal myth, a state doctrine. If you can be trained to swallow the irrational, you can be trained to justify the inhuman.

The intent is polemical and tactical. Voltaire isn’t just lamenting human nature; he’s recruiting the reader into the Enlightenment project, where skepticism is a civic virtue. “As long as” is the nasty little hinge: it implies a condition that can be changed. Stop rewarding absurdity with reverence, and you cut the supply lines to violence.

The subtext is also a warning about power. Absurdities don’t float in on their own; they’re curated. Institutions benefit when people outsource their judgment. Once reason is dethroned, authority can slot in any script it wants: heretics, witches, foreigners, “degenerates.” Atrocity becomes administration.

Context matters. Voltaire wrote in the shadow of Europe’s religious wars and legal barbarities, and he became famous for attacking fanaticism through essays, satire, and interventions in wrongful convictions (like the Calas affair). His cynicism isn’t pessimism for sport; it’s the hard-earned recognition that irrational certainty is combustible. Skepticism, for him, is not a mood. It’s a public safety measure.