Voltaire, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: let us forgive one another's follies — it is the first law of nature.1 That is the whole doctrine, if you want it in a sentence. What follows is merely its application to a world that has spent fifteen centuries refusing it. The merchant on the exchange at Amsterdam does not ask his counterpart whether the Logos proceeds from the Father before he accepts his bill of exchange.2
A Parsee, a Jew, a Quaker, a Roman Christian — they trade, they settle accounts, they go home. It is only when one of them decides that his neighbour must also believe as he believes that the dagger comes out. The commerce of ideas has never required that unanimity; the commerce of cloth has always known it.3 Dogma is the engine of the slaughter.
The less of it, the less dispute; the less dispute, the less misery.4 Constantine wrote to Alexander and Arius — two men quarrelling over the manner in which the Logos emanated from the Father — that they were great fools to dispute about things they did not understand.5 He was right, and then he ignored his own letter and spent the rest of his reign persecuting.
The Christian world paid for that inconsistency in blood for three hundred years.6 Now: what is not toleration. It is not the demand that you think well of your neighbour's opinions. It is not even the demand that you be gentle in print — I have never been gentle in print and I do not recommend it as a virtue. It is the single, precise proposition that the magistrate may not punish opinion; that the rack is not a logical instrument; that a man broken on the wheel in Toulouse for a crime no evidence established is not a theological argument but a judicial murder.
We are all passengers on a leaking ship.7 Nestorian, Jew, Anabaptist, fire-worshipper — the storm does not distinguish among us, and the water rising in the hold does not care which council first anathematized which. The question is whether we will stop the leak together or quarrel over the catechism until we drown.8 That is not a metaphor I offer for ornament.
It is the precise situation of the Calas family in 1762, of the Sirvens, of the chevalier de La Barre — particular people, particular instruments of torture, particular courts that preferred their prejudice to their evidence.9 The most dangerous superstition is not the worship of a relic. It is the hatred of one's neighbour on account of his opinions.10 Everything else follows from that.
We are all steeped in weaknesses and errors: let us forgive one another's follies, it is the first law of nature.Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 386–388
The Parsee, the Hindu, the Jew, the Mohammedan, the Chinese deist, the Brahman, the Greek Christian, the Roman Christian, the Protestant Christian, the Quaker Christian trade with each another in the stock exchanges of Amsterdam, London, Surat or Basra: they do not raise their daggers against one another to win souls for their religions.Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 386–388
they do not raise their daggers against one another to win souls for their religions. Why then have we butchered each other almost without interruption since the first council of Nicaea?Philosophical Dictionary, pp. 386–388
The less we have of dogma, the less dispute; the less we have of dispute, the less misery. If that is not true, I am wrong.Toleration and Other Essays
the Emperor Constantine at first wrote to them as follows (as we find in Eusebius and Socrates): 'You are great fools to dispute about things you do not understand.'Toleration and Other Essays
If the two parties had been wise enough to perceive that the emperor was right, the Christian world would not have been stained with blood for three hundred years.Toleration and Other Essays
The human race resembles a crowd of passengers on board a ship. Some are at the stern, others at the prow, many in the hold and in the bilges. The ship leaks on every side, the storm does not abate.Chapter x), pp. 162–167
what does it matter to which sect they belong? They should work together to stop the ship from leaking, so that each one, by securing his neighbour's life, also secures his own. Yet they quarrel with one another and perish.Chapter x), pp. 162–167
It would seem, Sir, that every time a benevolent spirit undertakes to render service to mankind, a wicked demon rises up immediately to undo the work of reason.Chapter x), pp. 162–167
And of all these superstitions, is not the most dangerous that of hating one's neighbour on account of his opinions?Toleration and Other Essays