“Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals, without the animals' instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the morrow; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life indeed — they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die, and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was sent to redeem.”

— Evelyn Beatrice Hall , book The Friends of Voltaire

Source: The Friends of Voltaire (1906), Ch. 8 : Turgot: The Statesman, p. 218

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Evelyn Beatrice Hall 12

English writer 1868–1956

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