Voltaire
Crush intolerance with reason and irony.
Misconceptions
Voltaire said: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
A false quotation. The sentence is by an English biographer, Evelyn Beatrice Hall, in 1906: she used it to sum up Voltaire's attitude to a book by Helvétius, and later acknowledged the words were her own. It appears in no text by Voltaire. What he actually wrote about toleration is less heroic and more modest: we are all weak and in error, let us forgive one another.
Voltaire was an atheist.
He is a deist: the order of the world proves an "architect", and denying that he exists is to him a "mania". His most quoted line, "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him", is preceded by an "if" he considers impossible: the heavens bear God's "imprint" and never cease to "manifest" him. He fights Churches and fanaticism, not God.
Candide mocks God.
The tale targets a philosophy: the optimism of Leibniz and Pope, for whom this world is "the best of all possible worlds". Pangloss, who keeps saying that "all is for the best" amid massacres and the Lisbon earthquake, is its caricature. Candide ends up defining optimism: "the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong". The tale also mocks priests and the Inquisition, but Voltaire remains a deist.