Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education? Haven't you also that passive obedience which is so easily converted into soldierly obedience? Military establishment which pushes the regulations to the extreme of firing upon Garibaldi; that is to say, upon the living honor of Italy? Let us subject your social order to examination, let us take it where it stands and as it stands, let us view its flagrant offenses, show me the woman and the child. It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured. Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris? What is the amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words: public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner, the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Bacteria is dead and Furnace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons. Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality and politics? You have reached the point where you grant amnesty to heroes! Something very similar has been done in France. Stay, let us pass miseries in review, let each one contribute in his pile, you are as rich as we. Have you not, like ourselves, two condemnations, religious condemnation pronounced by the priest, and social condemnation decreed by the judge? Oh, great nation of Italy, thou resembles the great nation of France! Alas! Our brothers, you are, like ourselves, Miserable.

— Victor Hugo

Where no plan is laid where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incident chaos will soon reign.

— Victor Hugo

. . .where there is no more hope, song remains.

— Victor Hugo

Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and who can say which has the wider vision?

— Victor Hugo

Where would the shout of love begin, if not from the summit of sacrifice? Oh my brothers, this is the junction between those who think and those who suffer; this barricade is made neither of paving stones nor of timbers nor of iron; it is made of two mounds, a mound of ideas and a mound of sorrows. Here misery encounters the ideal. Here day embraces night, and says: I will die with you, and you will be born again with me. From the heavy embrace of all desolation springs faith. Sufferings bring their agony here, and ideas their immortality. This agony and immortality will mingle and make up our death. Brothers, whoever dies here dies in the radiance of the future, and we are entering a grave illuminated by the dawn.

— Victor Hugo

While a battle still entirely political was preparing in this same place which had already seen so many revolutionary events, while the youth, the secret associations, the schools in the name of principles, and the middle class in the name of interests, were moving in to dash against each other, to grapple and overthrow each other, while each was hurrying and calling the final and decisive hour of the crisis, far off and outside that fatal sector, in the deepest of the unfathomable caverns of that miserable old Paris, the gloomy voice of the people was heard deeply growling. A fearful, sacred voice, composed of the roaring brute and the speech of God, which terrifies the feeble and warns the wise, which comes at the same time from below like the voice of a lion and from above like the voice of thunder. Page 1123 Saint-Denis Chapter 13 part II

— Victor Hugo

Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?

— Victor Hugo

Why, there's the air, the sky, the morning, the evening, moonlight, my friends, women, the beautiful architecture of Paris to study, three big books to write and all sorts of other things. Anaxagoras used to say that he was in the world in order to admire the sun. And then I have the good fortune to be able to spend my days from morning to night in the company of a man of genius - myself - and it's very pleasant.

— Victor Hugo

Wide horizons lead the soul to broad ideas; circumscribed horizons engender narrow ideas; this sometimes condemns great hearts to become small-minded. Broad ideas hated by narrow ideas, —this is the very struggle of progress.

— Victor Hugo

Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man.

— Victor Hugo