This anthology, inspired by Voltaire's advice that a text needed to be concise to have real influence, contains firey extracts from forty different authors, from the philosophers everyone's heard of to those whose brilliant writings are less well-known. They are immensely diverse in style and topic, but all have in common their passionate commitment to equality, freedom, and tolerance, and every single one resonates powerfully with the issues our world faces today. The book was first published by the Societe francaise d'etude du dix-huitieme siecle (the French Society for Eighteenth-Century...