- Lived:
- 1694–1778 · Paris, London, Cirey, Berlin, Geneva, and finally Ferney, an estate parked deliberately on the French–Swiss border
- Tradition:
- French Enlightenment; the philosophe as public campaigner
- The Big Idea:
- Fanaticism — belief so certain it will torture for God — is the great enemy of the human race, and the cure is toleration, reason, and relentless, well-aimed laughter.
- In their words:
- "Écrasez l'infâme!" — "Crush the infamous thing!" — the war-cry he scrawled at the end of hundreds of letters, aimed at persecuting fanaticism.
- If you remember one thing:
- He built no philosophical system. Instead he invented a job — the public intellectual — by taking real miscarriages of justice and hammering them with evidence, publicity, and wit until the verdicts broke.