FASCINATING PEOPLE, Part 15.

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) was a French writer (satirist) and 18th-century enlightenment. He is remembered as a crusader against tyranny and bigotry. He has deeply influenced the French Revolution. Voltaire did not support the dogmatic theology of institutional religions, his religiosity was anticlerical. But atheism Voltaire considered nearly always fatal to virtue. As a humanist, Voltaire advocated religious and social tolerance, Was imprisoned at the Bastille, and later lived in exile mainly in England."In general, the art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to the other." (from Dictionnaire Philosophique). In his late years Voltaire produced several anti-religious writing. Voltaire's outrage is not based on social criticism but on his ironic view of human nature.