Quote by Voltaire: “Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.”

What someone chooses to ask reveals far more about their mind than what they confidently claim to know. Good answers can be memorised; good questions require genuine curiosity and the courage to admit uncertainty. Intelligence begins in asking, not asserting.

Voltaire spent his career combating what he saw as the self-satisfied certainty of religious and political orthodoxy in eighteenth-century France. He valued the spirit of inquiry — the question — above the inherited answer, and modelled this in his own relentless critique of authority.

French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on religious intolerance, and his advocacy for freedom of speech. His satirical novella Candide, published in 1759, remains a masterpiece of ironic prose.