Evelyn Beatrice Hall Quotes

""I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

(my addition: ". . . as long as money, chicanery & power do not influence whose viewpoint is heard more.")"

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it

In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was 'the compulsory instrument of great evil,' he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could — what a different world!

I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation.

There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring.

For the first time he looked into his heart and wrote, and thus for the first time he touched the hearts of others; the cold style took fire, and beneath the clumsy periods welled tears.

He who has lost only those of whose faith and truth he is sure, has not yet reached the depth of human desolation.

I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.

Disapprovo quello che dite, ma difenderò fino alla morte il vostro diritto di dirlo

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person.

'What a fuss about an omelette!' he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," was his attitude now.

It is by character and not by intellect the world is won.