Wit & Attitude Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire doesn’t spare the “fools” here; he indicts a whole social arrangement built on voluntary captivity. The sting is in “revere”: the chains aren’t merely imposed by tyrants or priests, they’re cherished by the people wearing them. That word turns oppression from a simple crime into a cultural habit, even a form of devotion. It’s not ignorance as absence, but ignorance as attachment.

The line carries the signature Voltairean move of the Enlightenment polemicist: disdain sharpened into diagnosis. Freedom, he implies, is not primarily a technical problem of policy; it’s a psychological and rhetorical problem. The hardest barrier to reform is not censorship or police power but the internalized story that makes submission feel like virtue - tradition as moral comfort, obedience as identity, superstition as community glue. When people revere their restraints, arguments for liberty don’t land as helpful; they land as insults.

Historically, this sits inside an 18th-century battlefield where church authority, monarchical power, and inherited status justified themselves as natural order. Voltaire’s campaigns against fanaticism and clerical overreach weren’t just legal critiques; they were fights over narrative, over what the public considered sacred. The quote’s intent is strategic: warn reformers that ridicule alone won’t liberate anyone, and warn citizens that reverence can be trained. It’s a bleak little sentence, but it works because it names complicity without letting power off the hook.