Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s line flatters dessert with the same sly precision he used to flatter kings: just enough sweetness to expose the rot beneath. “Ice-cream is exquisite” opens like a harmless compliment, then the pivot lands - “what a pity it isn’t illegal” - turning pleasure into a political instrument. The joke isn’t that Voltaire wanted to criminalize sorbet. It’s that power so often does criminalize what people enjoy, especially when enjoyment sits outside authority’s permission slip.

The subtext runs on Enlightenment skepticism: if something is genuinely good, the state, the church, or custom will find a way to regulate it, tax it, shame it, or brand it morally suspect. By pretending to mourn ice cream’s legal status, Voltaire mocks the logic of prohibition and the fetish for control. He’s also riffing on the perversity of desire: illegality doesn’t just constrain pleasure; it manufactures it. Make a thing forbidden and you give it an aura, a market, a thrill - the exact opposite of virtue.

Context matters. Voltaire wrote in a world of sumptuary rules, censorship, and moral policing where authorities claimed to protect public order while quietly protecting hierarchy. Ice cream, a luxury import associated with wealth and courtly fashion, becomes an ideal prop: innocent, frivolous, decadent. The line works because it treats repression as predictable, almost banal. The laugh is sharp because it’s recognition: the machinery that bans books can also, absurdly, ban dessert - and it rarely needs a better reason than “because we can.”