Evelyn Beatrice Hall: The Woman Behind Voltaire’s Most Famous Quote

Many people believe that the famous defence of free speech,

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

was written by Voltaire. It wasn’t.

The words were written in 1906 by the English writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her book The Friends of Voltaire.

Hall was trying to explain Voltaire’s attitude towards the French writer Claude Adrien Helvétius, whose work had been condemned and burned. Rather than quote Voltaire directly, she distilled his philosophy into a single sentence of her own. Years later, she explained: “I did not intend it to be a quotation.”

But by then it was too late. The line had escaped into the world and become attached to Voltaire’s name.

Something is fitting about this. Hall’s sentence is so clear, so precise, and so memorable that it feels as though it ought to have been written by one of history’s great philosophers. Instead, it came from a writer whose name is scarcely known today.

The achievement is easy to overlook. Hall did not discover a continent, invent a machine or lead an army. She did something rarer. She took a complicated principle, that freedom means defending the rights of people with whom we disagree, and expressed it in fourteen unforgettable words.

Millions of people have quoted that sentence. Politicians, judges, journalists and campaigners have used it to defend free expression. Yet almost none of them know the name of the woman who wrote it.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall

Recommended Reading

The Friends of Voltaire by S. G. Tallentyre (the pen name of Evelyn Beatrice Hall)