Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire lands the blade where polite society hides its blood: in the sanctimony of “law” and the pageantry that launders violence into virtue. The line reads like a legal maxim twisted into a punchline, and that twist is the point. “It is forbidden to kill” sets up the comforting fiction of moral clarity, then “therefore” arrives with mock-logical obedience, as if the speaker is dutifully following reason to its conclusion. What follows is an indictment of reason abused: the prohibition is real only for the small-time, the unsanctioned, the uncostumed.

The subtext is that states don’t abolish killing; they monopolize it. Voltaire isn’t mainly interested in the murderer as a lone deviant. He’s aiming at the social machinery that turns mass killing into something ceremonious: uniforms, anthems, “trumpets.” Those trumpets aren’t decoration; they’re the alibi. They supply narrative (war, glory, necessity) and collective participation (crowds, flags, applause) so that violence stops looking like crime and starts looking like policy.

Context matters: Voltaire writes in an era of dynastic wars, public executions, religious persecutions, and monarchic authority that claims moral legitimacy while practicing brutality at scale. His Enlightenment strategy is to make hypocrisy visible by shrinking the distance between battlefield and back alley. Once you see that the difference is largely paperwork and music, the moral hierarchy collapses. The joke stings because it’s still true: legality often tracks power, not innocence, and the loudest trumpets still drown out the screaming.