Your Voltaire Quote is Bad, And You Should Feel Bad

Libraries are wonderful things, they provide access to books and an environment in which you can read them. Sometimes, they’ll have displays of current research undertaken by students or staff, or motivating quotes on their walls. This is the story of such a quote, and why its place on the wall of the library is so undeserved, especially in the wake of the most recent wave of strikes.

I first came across this quote when I was sat, as a third year student is wont to do, in the silent section of the library. A middle aged woman, presumably staff, walked past me to leave, but she paused briefly as she did so. She tilted her head in thought, and took a picture of the wall. My interest piqued, I retraced her steps to see what had caught her attention. A notice? A poster for an event? No, it was a Voltaire quote that reads as follows:

“Let us READ, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world”- Voltaire

I didn’t really think anything of it. A fairly mundane quote that was celebrating the joy and innocence of reading and dancing. I sat down and went about my business of pretending to work whilst scrolling through twitter, but something just didn’t sit right with me about that quote. I googled it. And so began the descent into a rabbit hole that would fill me with indignation. I was faced with a deluge of blurry landscapes overlayed with this Voltaire quote in garish typefaces. Nothing radical has ever been superimposed onto a picture of the sea.

It gets worse. The provenance of the quote is from Voltaire’s essay on ‘The Liberty of the Press’. Surely an early radical defence on an essential part of a functioning democracy? The opposite. His belief in freedom of the press is not predicated on any principle of liberty per se, but on the premise that it’s utterly harmless. No book has ever brought down an empire, so why bother worrying about it?

What a horrific philosophy to plaster in four foot letters on your library. Not only is it flatly wrong, but it suggests that the moment your intellectual activities become incendiary to the powers that be, they should cease.

Books, texts, and ideas precede almost every revolution one can think of. Was it not Luthers’ 95 Theses that precipitated a chain of events that led to the secession of Britain from the Church? Was it not the work of Rousseau, Mill, and Paine that brought about the American revolution? Was it not the words of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky that brought about the biggest challenge to western hegemony in the 20th Century?

Let us read, for this amusement will harm the world.

Though Voltaire had little more to say on it, dance too has the radical potential to be transgressive. Look at the rave scene of the 90s. Illegal raves bringing together hordes of people to engage in nothing more than dance and drop Es. This act of radical praxis had implications on drug, land, and music legislation — the drive to dance has real, material consequences. Look too at the ballet dancers joining the general strike in France, putting on free performances for those resisting the Capitalist regime. Again, dance can be, and is, a radical form of resistance.

Let us dance, for this amusement will harm the world

In ostensibly celebrating liberty, this quote only reinforces conformity. It is the radical potential of these acts that should be the source of their advocacy, not their impotence. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from the university’s endorsement of this quote is their endorsement of the existing system itself. Universities should be places of knowledge production that challenge the status quo, not part of it.

The university student effectively finds themselves alternating between two modes of being. The first is long stints in the library and lecture theatres; reading and researching, digesting, creating, and ultimately disseminating knowledge from the academic ivory towers to the masses. The second is to be found in a dingy nightclub, the smell of cheap spirits, vomit, and sweat intermingling in an electric air. Time appears to stop as dance takes over your whole being — these short but pregnant hours allow you to escape the linear drudgery of the neoliberal world

This is the university experience — so a quote ostensibly celebrating these two things is understandable, admirable even. But it’s wrong, so wrong. It’s a patronising and deeply anti-radical message, and I propose an alternative.

Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will do harm to the world.

Stick that on your wall.