Voltaire Quotes

There are more fools in the world than there are people.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

All the Khmer leaders and nobles, all the district chiefs and all the common people are ignorant, stupid, foolish and gullible. They have no idea what is true and what is false.

Ah! how little knowledge does a man acquire in his life. He gathers it up like water, but like water it runs between his fingers, and yet, if his hands be but wet as though with dew, behold a generation of fools call out, 'See, he is a wise man!' Is it not so?

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.

It ain't what a man don't know that makes him a fool, but what he does know that ain't so.

The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain't so.

For every man's nature is concealed with many folds of disguise, and covered as it were with various veils. His brows, his eyes, and very often his countenance, are deceitful, and his speech is most commonly a lie.

La ve rite , comme la lumie' re, aveugle. Le mensonge, au contraire, est un beau cre puscule qui met chaque objet en valeur. Truth, like light, blinds. A lie, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight which shows the value of each object.

The trouble with most folks isn't their ignorance. It's knowin' so many things that ain't so.

All that shimmers on the surface of the world, all that we call interesting, is the fruit of ignorance and inebriation.

Stupidity is not another form of knowledge.

He who considers himself a paragon of wisdom is sure to commit some superlatively stupid act.

Mundus vult decipi: the world wants to be deceived.

And this shows that sometimes people want to be stupid and they do not want to know the truth.

He swallowed a lot of wisdom, but all of it seems to have gone down the wrong way.

The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.

There some trifles well habited, as there are some fools well clothed.

Funny, now I can see, how looks can be deceiving.

The picture that looks as if it were done without an effort may have been a perfect battlefield in its making.

Educated fools; from uneducated schools.

It is wise to remember that you are one of those who can be fooled some of the time.

Whatever is almost true is quite false, and among the most dangerous of errors, because being so near truth, it is more likely to lead astray.

The technique of infamy is to start two lies at once and get people arguing heatedly over which is the truth.