The sadness which reigned everywhere was but an excuse for unfailing kindness. - Victor Hugo

So long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Miserables cannot fail to be of use.

La lumière est dans le livre. Ouvrez le livre tout grand. Laissez-le rayonner, laissez-le faire.

We who combat them are "the eternal enemies of order." We are—for they can as yet find nothing but this worn-out word—we are demagogues. In the language of the Duke of Alva, to believe in the sacredness of the human conscience, to resist the Inquisition, to brave the state for one's faith, to draw the sword for one's country, to defend one's worship, one's city, one's home, one's house, one's family, and one's God, was called vagabondism... The man is a demagogue in the nineteenth century, who in the sixteenth would have been a vagabond. Book II, XI