The Value of Questions
The Value of Questions
“I may not agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.” When I hear that statement, I automatically think of “The Freedom of Speech” an idea America was based on. However, that quote is not at all American, it was taken from Voltaire, a French philosopher who’s thoughts changed the world as we know it. In fact, Victor Hugo said that the name Voltaire was to characterize the entire eighteenth century. For just as surely as the geological periods in the earth's history have left their stratified imprint on the earth's formation, so the work and influence of Voltaire are unmistakably impressed upon the progress and intellectual development of mankind.
One of the most important days in the history of mankind was November 20, 1694, when Francois Marie Arouet was born to humble parents as a puny, sickly, ugly child. This anemic and cynically faced individual made the time in which he lived momentous (10). Before he was ten years old, it was plain that the young Voltaire had a clever mind. At that age he was sent to a boys' school in France. His body was lean and thin and his mind was keen and active, and neither his body nor his mind changed these characteristics to the day of his death. At the school he says he learned "Latin and nonsense," and nothing else.
Voltaire was not like the other boys. He did not care for games or sports. While the other children were busy with youthful games he was talking with the fathers, who were the teachers in the school. He turned his eyes to his professors and said, "Everyone must jump after his own fashion." This was an idea Voltaire always carried with him his entire life (28).
At the age of fifteen, his father decided to make him an advocate. He picked out the profession for his son, because it was his own; but Voltaire's early efforts at poetry had given him the ambition to write and he insisted that he should not follow his father's footsteps, but devote his life to literature. "Literature," said the parent, "is the profession of the man who wishes to be useless to society, and a burden to his relatives, and to die of hunger." Bur even Voltaire's father could not make a...