"The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year"
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Mischief, Voltaire implies, is cheap, abundant, and socially rewarded in ways virtue rarely is. The line lands because it treats wrongdoing not as a dramatic rupture but as the default setting of daily life: a hundred little chances to cut corners, flatter power, humiliate a rival, spread a rumor, look away. “Once in a year” is deliberate exaggeration, a satirist’s scalpel. He’s not doing math; he’s indicting how few situations truly invite costly goodness, and how quickly institutions convert moral action into inconvenience.
The subtext is as much about design as character. Voltaire lived in a world of courts, patronage, censorship, and confessional politics where cruelty could be bureaucratic and routine, while kindness often required risk. In that ecosystem, “mischief” isn’t just personal malice; it’s the everyday opportunism that keeps hierarchies humming. Doing good, by contrast, tends to be episodic because it collides with self-interest, surveillance, and the price of dissent.
What makes the sentence sting is its asymmetry: evil is frictionless, good is bottlenecked. It’s also a quiet rebuke to moral vanity. People imagine themselves as heroes-in-waiting, but Voltaire suggests the real test is not the once-a-year grand gesture; it’s resisting the hundred daily temptations to be petty, cowardly, or complicit. In an age that marketed piety while practicing persecution, the joke is that virtue is scarce not because it’s mysterious, but because the world is built to make it impractical.
The subtext is as much about design as character. Voltaire lived in a world of courts, patronage, censorship, and confessional politics where cruelty could be bureaucratic and routine, while kindness often required risk. In that ecosystem, “mischief” isn’t just personal malice; it’s the everyday opportunism that keeps hierarchies humming. Doing good, by contrast, tends to be episodic because it collides with self-interest, surveillance, and the price of dissent.
What makes the sentence sting is its asymmetry: evil is frictionless, good is bottlenecked. It’s also a quiet rebuke to moral vanity. People imagine themselves as heroes-in-waiting, but Voltaire suggests the real test is not the once-a-year grand gesture; it’s resisting the hundred daily temptations to be petty, cowardly, or complicit. In an age that marketed piety while practicing persecution, the joke is that virtue is scarce not because it’s mysterious, but because the world is built to make it impractical.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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