defend to the death your right to say it -- excerpt from the FAQ
Sam Hobbs
(now at http://home.earthlink.net/~altquot/):
======================
disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to
say it
A frequently asked question and quotation on alt.quotations is who
said:
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your
right to say it.
--- (attributed) Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet; 1694-1778), French
writer.
I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the
death your right to say it.
--- Variation given by Will Durant: The Story of Philosophy, p.271.
The quote is really a misattribution or, depending on how liberal your
interpretation is, a paraphrase from Voltaire. It has sometimes been
misattributed to Rousseau or Alexander Hamilton, but the correct
misattribution is to Voltaire. Probably the best way to cite the quote
is as given above.
The background to this quote (according to Paul F. Boller, Jr. and
John George, They Never Said It, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp
124-126) is that, in 1758, the French author Helvétius wrote a book De
l'esprit (On the Mind) "setting forth the idea that selfishness and
the passions are the sole mainsprings of human actions and that there
are no such things as virtues and vices." The book was widely
condemned by both government and church authorities, and the issue
culminated in a public burning of the book by civil authorities and a
two year exile for the author. (It appears that censorship was taken
quite seriously in France at that time.) Voltaire was not impressed
with the book but disapproved of the censorship that resulted.
According to the 1941 Little, Brown edition of Bartlett's (as well as
later editions):
This quotation is not found verbatim in Voltaire's works. It seems to
originate in S.G. Tallentyre (E. Beatrice Hall): The Friends of
Voltaire (1907), where she employed it as a paraphrase of Voltaire's
words in the Essay on Tolerance: "Think for yourselves and let others
enjoy the privilege to do so." The editors are under obligation to Mr.
Harry Weinberger for establishing this point.
If this source is true (and it appears to be the most widely accepted
explanation), it has been commented by one of the alt.quotations
contributors that "it raises (or lowers?) paraphrase to the level of
pure invention."
Evelyn Beatrice Hall herself provided a somewhat different slant on
her paraphrase in a letter to the New York Times in 1935:
I believe I did use in it [The Friends of Voltaire] the phrase . . .
as a description of Voltaire's attitude to Helvétius book "On the
Mind" (De L'Esprit) -- and more widely, to the freedom of expression
in general. I do not think, and I did not intend to imply, that
Voltaire used these words verbatim, and should be surprised if they
are found in any of his works.
--- Evelyn Beatrice Hall
letter to the editor, New York Times, September 1, 1935.
A couple of directly related quotes from Helvétius and Voltaire are:
To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of
certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or
slaves.
--- Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715-1771), French philosopher, De
L'Homme, Vol. 1, sec. 4.
We have a natural right to make use of our pens as of our tongues, at
our peril, risk and hazard.
--- Voltaire, "Liberty of the Press" in Philosophical Dictionary
(1764)
Bartlett's goes on to point out
Norbert Guterman, in A Book of French Quotations (1963), suggests that
the probable source for the quotation is from a line in a letter to M.
le Riche [February 6, 1770]: "Monsieur l'abbe, I detest what you
write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to
continue to write."
which is a clear demonstration that Voltaire certainly expressed the
sentiment in words far closer to the attribution than is suggested by
the first (and apparently more widely accepted) explanation.
In addition, both the Electronic Freedom Foundation Quotes Collection
and the "Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics", Meet the Web page state
that the correct quote is as follows:
I never approved either the errors of his book, or the trivial truths
he so vigorously laid down. I have, however, stoutly taken his side
when absurd men have condemned him for these same truths.
--- Voltaire (often poorly paraphrased as "I disapprove of what he
says, but I will defend to the death his right to say it.")
This statement also has a strong appeal and certainly seems to be
consistent with the background information, but it has less
credibility without a detailed citation than the other information
listed above.
It is worth noting that the phony (or as they say today, "faux")
Voltaire quote appeared over the Letters to the Editor section of the
late New York Herald Tribune. One of the alt.quotations contributors
notes that, the Tribune, despite its sometimes off-the-wall,
right-wing editorials was a far better newspaper than the vastly
overrated New York Times is today. He also notes that, to its eternal
credit, the Tribune also employed Ernest Hemingway and other
expatriate Americans as foreign correspondents. Hemingway ascribed his
somewhat terse prose style to the penny-pinching Tribune editors who
objected to every superfluous word in his telegraphed dispatches from
France.
An interesting footnote (at least to me) is that, on June 18, 1997,
Sam Hobbs posted regarding this question (in complete ignorance of
what the future would bring): "This may be a frequently asked
quotation in the faq, but I am not certain." Well, it was not then,
but it is now. (Sam Hobbs)
Contributors from alt.quotations include: Col. G. L. Sicherman, Ed C.,
A. Wallen, T. Bruce Tober, Chris Hawkins, The Sanity Inspector,
Serenleono, Robert M. Wilson, LuliLuli, sjadams, James Adams (The
Grey-beard Loon) and Sam Hobbs
======================
Regards,
Sam
William C Waterhouse
....
> Bartlett's goes on to point out
>
> Norbert Guterman, in A Book of French Quotations (1963), suggests that
> the probable source for the quotation is from a line in a letter to M.
> le Riche [February 6, 1770]: "Monsieur l'abbe, I detest what you
> write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to
> continue to write."
>
> which is a clear demonstration that Voltaire certainly expressed the
> sentiment in words far closer to the attribution than is suggested by
> the first (and apparently more widely accepted) explanation.
I'll repeat a comment I posted some time last year:
Unfortunately, Bartlett's misunderstood Guterman's abbreviations.
The quotation immediately before this one in Guterman ("They say
that God is always on the side of the big battalions") comes from
the letter to M. le Riche. This one does not (I've checked to be sure),
and Guterman actually identifies it only as being at an unspecified
place in Voltaire's correspondence.
William C. Waterhouse
Penn State