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Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.
Victor Hugo -
Liberation is not deliverance.
Victor Hugo
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There have been in this century only one great man and one great thing: Napoleon and liberty. For want of the great man, let us have the great thing.
Victor Hugo -
The most powerful symptom of love is a tenderness which becomes at times almost insupportable.
Victor Hugo -
A society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, seem to me an inferior society and a debased humanity; it is a higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aiming - a society without kings, a humanity without barriers.
Victor Hugo -
There are no rules, no models; rather, there are no rules other than the general laws of Nature.
Victor Hugo -
Wherever the Turkish hoof trods, no grass grows.
Victor Hugo -
Every diminution of the liberty of the press is followed by a diminution of civilization. Wherever we see the freedom of the press interfered with, there we see the nutrition of the human family interrupted.
Victor Hugo
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Initiative is doing the right thing without being told.
Victor Hugo -
I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.
Victor Hugo -
Certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when, whatever be the attitude of the body, the soul is on its knees.
Victor Hugo -
Never had the sky been more studded with stars and more charming, the trees more trembling, the odor of the grass more penetrating; never had the birds fallen asleep among the leaves with a sweeter noise; never had all the harmonies of universal serenity responded more thoroughly to the inward music of love; never had Marius been more captivated, more happy, more ecstatic.
Victor Hugo -
God has bestowed two gifts on man: hope and ignorance. Ignorance is the better of the two.
Victor Hugo -
It is often necessary to know how to obey a woman in order sometimes to have the right to command her.
Victor Hugo
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What would be ugly in a garden constitutes beauty in a mountain.
Victor Hugo -
My childhood began, as everybody's childhood begins, with prejudices. Man finds prejudices beside his cradle, puts them from him a little in the course of his career, and often, alas! takes to them again in his old age.
Victor Hugo -
Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.
Victor Hugo -
Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.
Victor Hugo -
The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
Victor Hugo -
Love is jealous, and ingenious in self-torture in proportion as it is pure and intense.
Victor Hugo
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Religions do a useful thing: they narrow God to the limits of man. Philosophy replies by doing a necessary thing: it elevates man to the plane of God.
Victor Hugo -
No doubt it was necessary to civilize man in relation to man. That work is already advanced and is making progress every day. But man must be civilized also in relation to nature.
Victor Hugo -
Separated lovers cheat absence by a thousand fancies which have their own reality. They are prevented from seeing one another and they cannot write; nevertheless they find countless mysterious ways of corresponding, by sending each other the song of birds, the scent of flowers, the laughter of children.
Victor Hugo -
Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book.
Victor Hugo