I spent years building the Encyclopédie so people could read facts without begging gatekeepers, and somehow I’m still the rude one in this little friend group. by Denis Diderot

Says the man who could turn a dinner invitation into a federal case.

Jean-Jacques, you cannot keep pretending every disagreement is a persecution arc.

Little friend group is generous, Denis. You wrote a mountain of pages and still found time to be dramatic in every salon in Paris.

Voltaire, please, you wrote like a machine and argued like a king who found out the peasants can read.

He absolutely can. It is his only hobby besides being offended by civilization.

At least he wrote pages. Some of us just wrote complaints and called it philosophy.

The real scandal is that the Encyclopédie gave everyone access to ideas, and now the loudest men in Europe are upset they sound ordinary.