We must cultivate our garden.

A book dripping with satire? I think I’m going to like it. But only if it’s 100 pages and not 1000, which is why I read Candide and not Don Quixote. Voltaire seems like an interesting guy. He’s quite pragmatic, which I like, but his ideal government would be a benevolent monarch, which I don’t. It’s not so much the benevolent monarch I’m worried about as much as the subsequent malignant one.

Something that came to mind while reading Candide is that I don’t think authors criticize their adversaries so openly anymore. Maybe it’s that I just don’t read philosophy. It could also be that today nobody has writing ability required, or takes the time, to denounce their enemies in a novel. It’s easier to just call your book Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man or Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot.