Quotes by Victor Hugo

Si lon nest plus que mille, eh bien, jen suis ! Si mêmeIls ne sont plus que cent, je brave encor Sylla ;Sil en demeure dix, je serai le dixième ;Et sil nen reste quun, je serai celui-là !(If were just a thousand, then, here I am! Even ifTheyre just a hundred, still I face Sylla;If ten still stand, Ill be the tenth;And if there is only one left, Ill be this one!)

What greater flood can there be than the flood of ideas? How quickly they submerge all that they set out to destroy, how rapidly do they create terrifying depths?

At the approach of a certain dark hour, the light of Heaven fills those who are quitting the light of Earth.

Ah, Monsieur Priest, you love not the crudities of the true. Christ loved them. He seized a rod and cleared out the Temple. His scourge, full of lightnings, was a harsh speaker of truths. When he cried, Sinite parvulos, he made no distinction between the little children. It would not have embarrassed him to bring together the Dauphin of Barabbas and the Dauphin of Herod. Innocence, Monsieur, is its own crown. Innocence has no need to be a highness. It is as august in rags as in fleurs de lys.

Relegated as he was to a corner and as though sheltered behind the billiard table, the soldiers, their eyes fixed upon Enjolras, had not even noticed Grantaire, and the sergeant was preparing to repeat the order: Take aim! when suddenly they heard a powerful voice cry out beside them, Vive la Republique! Count me in.Grantaire was on his feet. The immense glare of the whole combat he had missed and in which he had not been, appeared in the flashing eyes of the transfigured drunkard.He repeated, Vive la Republique! crossed the room firmly, and took his place in front of the muskets beside Enjolras.Two at one shot, he said.And, turning toward Enjolras gently, he said to him, Will you permit it?Enjolras shook his hand with a smile.The smile had not finished before the report was heard.Enjolras, pierced by eight bullets, remained backed up against the wall is if the bullets had nailed him there. Except that his head was tilted. Grantaire, struck down, collapsed at his feet.

Revolutions spring not from accident, but from necessity. A revolution is a return from the factitious to the real. It takes place because it must.

Every man who has in his soul a secret feeling of revolt against any act of the State, of life, or of destiny, is on the verge of riot; and so soon as it appears, he begins to quiver, and to feel himself borne away by the whirlwind.

Police chiefs dont think a cat can possibly turn into a lion; and yet, it happens.

At the side of Enjolras, who represented the logic of revolution, was Combeferre, representing its philosophy. The difference between logic and philosophy is that one can decide upon war, whereas the other can only be fulfilled by peace.

Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man.

In the future no one will kill anyone, the earth will shine, the human race will love. It will come, citizens, the day when all will be peace, harmony, light, joy, and life, it will come. And it is so that it comes that we are going to die.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs, of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout to them: “You are tearing up the pavements of hell!” They might reply: “That is because our barricade is made of good intentions.

He was Antinous, wild. You would have said, seeing the thoughtful reflection of his eye, that he had already, in some preceding existence, been through the revolutionary apocalypse. He knew its tradition like an eyewitness. He knew every little detail of that great thing.A pontifical and warrior nature, strange in a youth. He was officiating and militant; from the immediate point of view, a soldier of democracy; above the movement of the time, a priest of the ideal.

Enjolras caught glimpses of a luminous uprising under the dark skirts of the future.

Another said , I dont ask six months, I dont ask two. In less than two weeks well meet the government face to face. With twenty-five thousand men we can make our stand.

In Burgundy and in the cities of the South the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole topped by the revolutionary red bonnet.

All this ferment was public, we might almost say tranquil.The imminent insurrection gathered its storm calmly in the face of the government. No singularity was lacking in this crisis, still subterranean, but already perceptible. The middle class talked quietly with workingmen about the preparations. They would say, How is the uprising coming along? in the same tone in which they would have said, Hows your wife?

At five in the morning, some policemen, unannounced, entered the house of a man named Pardon, later a member of the section of the Barricade-Merry, and still later killed in the insurrection of April 1834, found him standing not far from his bed, with cartridges in his hands, caught in the act.

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

The French Revolution, which is nothing more nor less than the ideal armed with the sword, rose abruptly, and by that very movement, closed the door of evil and opened the door of good.It released the question, promulgated truth, drove away miasma, purified the century, crowned the people.We can say it created man a second time, in giving him a second soul, his rights. Page 997 Saint-Denis chapter 7 Argot part III