Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire swings the blade with a courtly bow: he grants Christianity the rhetorical high ground, then indicts its record with a single “but.” The line works because it pretends to be charitable. “Of course” flatters Christian self-conception - a faith built on mercy, turning cheeks, loving enemies - and then turns that self-image into evidence for the prosecution. If your creed preaches tolerance, intolerance isn’t just a moral failure; it’s hypocrisy.

The subtext is classic Voltaire: he’s not really debating theology, he’s auditing power. “Christians” here means institutions and majorities, not private believers. He’s targeting how a dominant religion, once fused with the state, treats dissent as contamination. The sting is comparative: he implies that even religions stereotyped as “fanatical” can’t match the intolerance Christians have practiced. It’s provocation designed to puncture complacency, not a neutral survey.

Context matters. Voltaire wrote in an Europe still living in the aftershock of the Reformation’s bloodletting, the revocation of toleration edicts, censorship, and persecution of Protestants and freethinkers in Catholic France. His campaign against “infamy” was less atheism than anti-cruelty: the Calas affair and similar miscarriages of justice made intolerance tangible, not abstract.

The intent, then, is strategic: shame Christianity into behaving like its own ideals, and shame Christian states into separating salvation from law. Voltaire’s irony isn’t ornamental; it’s leverage.