Start with the quote. If you are assigned a quote, research the author's background. You should have a basic idea of why that person is important, the individual's social or political position as it relates to your topic and the context in which the quote was made. If you were not assigned the quote, make sure the one you want to use is powerful, unusual or witty, and not too long. It also must directly relate to the central idea of your essay. In an article for the Writing Center at Harvard University, Patricia Kain points out even the snappiest quotation will only mislead the reader and blur the focus if it doesn't contribute strongly to your topic.
Place the quote either at the top of the page before the text of the essay or, if it is a short quote (less than four lines), you can place it as the beginning of your introduction. Purdue University’s Online Writing Center refers to both Modern Language Association and American Psychological Association styles for stand-alone long quotes as indented five spaces from the left margin. Short quotes are placed in quotation marks. Long quotes are not given quotation marks. In both cases, citation information (author, date of publication, page number) is placed in parentheses at the end of the quote and after the final quotation mark.
Launch your discussion from the quote and use the quote to help shape the contents of the essay. For example, if you were using the quote in the introduction to your article, you might ask whether this is a true statement as a means of launching your discussion. Your main points might be to explore why people have a tendency to believe in witty sayings, to provide some examples of witty sayings that are widely believed and to discuss why they prove nothing. In your conclusion, you can decide whether Voltaire was speaking truth or falsehood.