Voltaire

Voltaire appears across the corpus as a fixture of Will Durant’s canon and a source of intellectual-courage aphorisms. In The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time, Durant ranks Voltaire #8 on his list of the ten greatest minds (between Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant) and makes him the figurehead of the French Enlightenment, which Durant calls “the peak of human history, greater even than Periclean Greece, or Augustan Rome, or Medicean Italy.” Durant pairs his pen-over-scepter quip (“I have no scepter, but I have a pen”) with Louis XVI’s prison lament that Voltaire and Rousseau “are the men that have destroyed France” — to which Durant answers that they destroyed one France but liberated another, and freed America through their disciples Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson.

In Charlie Munger — USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address, Munger invokes Voltaire’s warning — “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong” — in the passage where he counsels keeping insights hidden to rise within an organization, the same spirit as his “make the client feel he’s the smartest person in the room” advice.

Context: Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) was the leading writer, satirist, and polemicist of the French Enlightenment — author of Candide, the Philosophical Dictionary, and a tireless campaigner for civil liberties, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech.

Where this appears

• The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time — ranked #8 on Durant’s list of the ten greatest minds; figurehead of the French Enlightenment Durant calls “the peak of human history.”
• Charlie Munger — USC Gould School of Law Commencement Address — quoted (“It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong”) on the danger of being visibly right when superiors are wrong.