He was an author and philosopher whose philosophy emphasized rationality, democracy, and scientific research. These interests can all be seen in Candide, for example, which has a philosopher as a main character and which satirizes Leibnitz's philosophy throughout the text. The novel Candide was written in response to the 1759 earthquake that struck Lisbon and caused the instant and indiscriminate death of thousands of people. Shocked by the horrific deaths of so many innocent people, Voltaire was also angered at this time by Leibnitz who wrote that, given the worlds God might have created, choosing to endow humanity with free will, "the world we live in is the best of all." all possible worlds." For Voltaire, this response to the earthquake amounted to an abominable moral complacency and indifference on the part of philosophers like Leibnitz, who according to Voltaire seemed to accept all the other normal sufferings and injustices of the world. So in Candide, Voltaire he relentlessly satirizes Leibnitz's formulation by shifting the emphasis to "this is the best of all possible worlds" and lifting the line whenever a character encounters a horrible calamity or atrocity. However, it should be added that Voltaire's hatred of the injustices perpetrated by the aristocracy, the church and the state - which he satirizes in Candide - also arise from his personal