Wit & Attitude Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire lands the blade with typical Enlightenment economy: prejudice isn’t merely a bad opinion, it’s a counterfeit method of thinking. The insult is calibrated. He doesn’t call prejudiced people evil; he calls them lazy, intellectually unserious, the kind of minds that borrow conclusions so they don’t have to do the work of reasoning. “Use” is the operative verb. Prejudice becomes a tool, not an accident - something selected because it’s convenient, socially rewarded, and fast.

The line’s real target is the masquerade. Prejudice loves to dress up as common sense, tradition, “how things are,” even morality. Voltaire exposes that costume by reframing prejudice as a substitute good: an imitation reason that produces certainty without evidence. That’s why the sentence hits like satire even when it’s sober. It’s not arguing with prejudices one by one; it’s shaming the cognitive shortcut that generates them.

Context matters. Voltaire wrote in a Europe where church authority, aristocratic hierarchy, and inherited dogma routinely claimed the mantle of rational order. His broader project was to deglamorize that inheritance, to treat superstition and sectarian hatred not as sacred mysteries but as solvable human errors. Read against the religious persecutions and intellectual censorship of his era, “fools” isn’t casual name-calling; it’s a political category. If prejudice is accepted as “reason,” power never has to justify itself.

The quote still stings because it refuses the comforting story that prejudice is just ignorance. It’s often an alibi. Voltaire’s point: when people stop reasoning, they don’t stop explaining - they just switch to explanations that protect their tribe.