François-Marie Arouet (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1778), better known by the pen name Voltaire (also called The Dictator of Letters), was a French Enlightenment writer, deist and philosopher.

Voltaire is well-known for his sharp wit, philosophical writings, and defense of civil liberties, including freedom of religion and the right to a fair trial. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform despite strict censorship laws in France and harsh penalties for those who broke them. A satirical polemist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize Church dogma and the French institutions of his day. Voltaire is considered one of the most influential figures of his time.

An Investigator of Gospels
Voltaire opposed Christian beliefs fiercely, but not consistently. On one hand, he claimed that the Gospels were figmented and Jesus did not exist--that they were produced by those who wanted to create God in their own image and were full of discrepancies. On the other hand, he claimed that this very same community preserved the texts without making any change to adjust those discrepancies. However, the defense of Christian apologetics of his time was usually not very convincing either, as many avoided Voltaire's work.

Philosophy
Voltaire wrote philisophical works as well as fiction and poetry. His largest philosophical work is the Dictionnaire philosophique, comprising articles contributed by him to the great Encyclopédie and of several minor pieces. While it directed criticism against French political institutions and Voltaire's personal enemies, the work mostly targeted the Bible and the Catholic Church. While his work is too superficial and common-sense to serve as philosophy in the sense of Kant or Rawles, it draws brilliant and insightful observations on concrete problems. The book ranks perhaps second only to the novels as showing the character, literary and personal, of Voltaire; and despite its form it is nearly as readable.

Miscellaneous
In general criticism and miscellaneous writing Voltaire is not inferior to himself in any of his other functions. Almost all his more substantive works, whether in verse or prose, are preceded by prefaces of one sort or another, which are models of his own light pungent causerie; and in a vast variety of nondescript pamphlets and writings he shows himself a perfect journalist. In literary criticism pure and simple his principle work is the Commentaire sur Corneille, though he wrote a good deal more of the same kind—sometimes (as in his Life and notices of Molière) independently sometimes as part of his Siécles. Nowhere, perhaps, except when he is dealing with religion, are Voltaire's defects felt more than here. He was quite unacquainted with the history of his own language and literature, and more here than anywhere else he showed the extraordinarily limited and conventional spirit which accompanied the revolt of the French 18th century against limits and conventions in theological, ethical and political matters.

Correspondence
There remains only the huge division of his correspondence, which is constantly being augmented by fresh discoveries, and which, according to Georges Bengesco, has never been fully or correctly printed, even in some of the parts longest known. In this great mass Voltaire's personality is of course best shown, and perhaps his literary qualities not worst. His immense energy and versatility, his adroit and unhesitating flattery when he chose to flatter, his ruthless sarcasm when he chose to be sarcastic, his rather unscrupulous business faculty, his more than rather unscrupulous resolve to double and twist in any fashion so as to escape his enemies—all these things appear throughout the whole mass of letters.

Voltaire's works, and especially his private letters, constantly contain the word l'infâme and the expression (in full or abbreviated) écrasez l'infâme. This has been misunderstood in many ways - the mistake going so far as in some cases to suppose that Voltaire meant Christ by this opprobrious expression. No careful and competent student of his works has ever failed to correct this gross misapprehension. L'infâme is not God; it is not Christ; it is not Christianity; it is not even Catholicism. Its briefest equivalent may be given as "persecuting and privileged orthodoxy" in general, and, more particularly, it is the particular system which Voltaire saw around him, of which he had felt the effects in his own exiles and the confiscations of his books, and of which he saw the still worse effects in the hideous sufferings of Calas and La Barre.

Legacy
Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static force only useful as a counterbalance since its "religious tax", or the tithe, helped to cement a powerbase against the monarchy.

Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses. To Voltaire only an enlightened monarch, advised by philosophers like himself, could bring about change as it was in the king's rational interest to improve the power and wealth of France in the world. Voltaire is quoted as saying that he "would rather obey one lion, than 200 rats of (his own) species". Voltaire essentially believed monarchy to be the key to progress and change.

He is best known in this day and age for his novel, Candide ou l'Optimisme (1759), which satirizes the philosophy of Gottfried Leibniz. Candide was subject to censorship and Voltaire did not openly claim it as his own work [1].

Voltaire is also known for many memorable aphorisms, like Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer ("If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him"), contained in a verse epistle from 1768, addressed to the anonymous author of a controversial work, The Three Impostors.

Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, not to be confused with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sent a copy of his "Ode to Posterity" to Voltaire. Voltaire read it through and said, "I do not think this poem will reach its destination."

Today, Voltaire is remembered and honoured in France as a courageous polemicist, who indefatigably fought for civil rights — the right to a fair trial and freedom of religion — and who denounced the hypocrisies and injustices of the ancien régime.

But some of his critics, like Thomas Carlyle, do argue that while he was unsurpassed in literary form, not even the most elaborate of his works was of much value for matter, and that he has never uttered any significant idea of his own.

The town of Ferney (France) where he lived his last 20 years of life, is now named Ferney-Voltaire. His Château is now a museum (L'Auberge de l'Europe). Voltaire's library is preserved intact in the Russian National Library, St Petersburg.

Quotations
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Voltaire"This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire."
"You know that these two nations are at war over a few acres of snow near Canada, and that they are spending on this little war more than all of Canada is worth."
"In this country, from time to time, we like to kill an admiral, to encourage the others" (Referencing the execution of Admiral Byng)(Candide)
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
"If there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism; if there were two they would cut each other’s throats. But there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness."
"I shall finally have to renounce your Optimism? I'm afraid to say that it's a mania for insisting that all is well when things are going badly." (Candide, renouncing the Leibnizian Optimism)
"One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker." (1776)
"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too." (Essay on Tolerance)
"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." Translation: "The best is the enemy of the good." (Dictionnaire Philosophique).
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." (Epistle on the "Three Imposters"). This statement by Voltaire became so familiar that Gustave Flaubert included it in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues ("Dictionary of commonplace ideas"), and it is still among the most frequently quoted of Voltaire's dicta.

Misattribution
The following quote is commonly misattributed to Voltaire:

I do not agree with a word you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.
It was actually first used by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G. Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), as a summation of Voltaire's attitude, based on statements in Essay on Tolerance where he asserts: "Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privelege to do so too".