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Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

About this Quote

Voltaire’s line lands like a legal brief disguised as a punchline: belief isn’t an innocent private hobby, it’s a political technology. The sentence is built on a cold, transactional verb - “make” - which shifts the focus from the believer’s weakness to the persuader’s power. Absurdities don’t just happen; they’re manufactured, sold, normalized. And once someone has accepted that reality can be bent on command, the moral limits that usually restrain action become just another negotiable fact.

The subtext is Voltaire’s lifelong war on imposed certainty, especially the kind wrapped in religious authority and state violence. Writing in an Europe still haunted by confessional conflict, censorship, and spectacles of punishment, he’d seen how institutions launder cruelty through doctrine: declare a person heretical, impure, subhuman, and the crowd will call brutality “justice.” The quote’s sly cynicism is that the road from nonsense to slaughter isn’t a leap - it’s a staircase. Start with the harmless-seeming demand to assent to contradictions. End with the readiness to obey contradictions in the realm of ethics.

Rhetorically, it works because it doesn’t moralize about “evil people.” It indicts a pipeline: epistemic submission leads to ethical submission. Voltaire isn’t warning that fanaticism is loud; he’s warning that it’s efficient. The most dangerous absurdity isn’t the one that sounds strange - it’s the one you’re pressured to repeat until it becomes normal, and then actionable.

Quote Details

TopicReason & Logic
Source
Later attribution: To Believe Or Not To Believe: The Social and Neurological... (Rahasya Poe, 2009) modern compilationISBN: 9781465318930 · ID: AzfjjU7CBB0C
Text match: 95.00%   Provider: Google Books
Evidence:
... Voltaire , " Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities , ” is that this is what this book is all about . The neural networks that make believing absurdities a reality are the same networks that allow a ...
Other candidates (1)
Questions sur les miracles (Voltaire, 1765)50.0%
Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste. (11th letter (in later coll...
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Voltaire. (2026, February 9). Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/those-who-can-make-you-believe-absurdities-can-36817/

Chicago Style
Voltaire. "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." FixQuotes. February 9, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/those-who-can-make-you-believe-absurdities-can-36817/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." FixQuotes, 9 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/those-who-can-make-you-believe-absurdities-can-36817/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Voltaire

Voltaire (November 21, 1694 - May 30, 1778) was a Writer from France.

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