"Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him"
About this Quote
Voltaire doesn’t just dunk on greed here; he exposes the petty economics of moral judgment. The target isn’t the “avaricious” man so much as the crowd that needs him to be a villain. Call someone stingy and you get to sound principled while quietly confessing a more awkward truth: your outrage is proportional to your disappointment. The supposed crime isn’t hoarding, it’s refusing to play along in a social marketplace where favors, gifts, and access are the real currency.
The line works because it flips the moral script. “Avaricious” reads like an ethical diagnosis, but Voltaire treats it as a label deployed by people who feel cheated of a payout. It’s cynicism with surgical timing: the hatred is less about virtue than about a blocked pipeline of benefit. Even the grammar is accusatory - “whom they call” suggests hearsay, a verdict reached by consensus rather than evidence, the kind of public morality that runs on gossip and self-interest.
In Voltaire’s France, this lands as more than a cocktail-party epigram. An ancien regime society ran on patronage, pensions, courtly access, church preferments - networks where survival and status depended on who could be induced to give. A person who won’t distribute, sponsor, or bribe doesn’t just seem ungenerous; he threatens the system’s informal payments. Voltaire, lifelong skeptic of sanctimony and institutional pieties, uses the “avaricious” figure as a mirror: the crowd’s righteousness is just frustrated appetite dressed up as ethics.
The line works because it flips the moral script. “Avaricious” reads like an ethical diagnosis, but Voltaire treats it as a label deployed by people who feel cheated of a payout. It’s cynicism with surgical timing: the hatred is less about virtue than about a blocked pipeline of benefit. Even the grammar is accusatory - “whom they call” suggests hearsay, a verdict reached by consensus rather than evidence, the kind of public morality that runs on gossip and self-interest.
In Voltaire’s France, this lands as more than a cocktail-party epigram. An ancien regime society ran on patronage, pensions, courtly access, church preferments - networks where survival and status depended on who could be induced to give. A person who won’t distribute, sponsor, or bribe doesn’t just seem ungenerous; he threatens the system’s informal payments. Voltaire, lifelong skeptic of sanctimony and institutional pieties, uses the “avaricious” figure as a mirror: the crowd’s righteousness is just frustrated appetite dressed up as ethics.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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