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Treatise on Tolerance

Voltaire·French

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Written in 1763 in response to the judicial murder of Jean Calas, a Protestant tortured to death on false charges of killing his son. Voltaire turned the case into a philosophical argument for religious tolerance.

It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I am saying that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siamese? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?

But these people despise us and call us idolaters! Very well, I should tell them that they are gravely mistaken. It seems to me that I might at least astonish the proud stubbornness of an imam or a Buddhist bonze if I were to speak to them more or less as follows: This little globe, which is but a point, rolls through space like so many other globes; we are lost in this immensity.

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