“Genuflection before the idol or the dollar destroys the muscles which walk and the will that moves.”

“The hand which moves over the dial moves also among souls.”

“For with love there is no middle course: it destroys, or else it saves. All human destiny is contained in that dilemma, the choice between destruction and salvation, which is nowhere more implacably posed than in love. Love is life, or it is death. It is the cradle, but also the coffin. One and the same impulse moves the human heart to say yes or no. Of all things God has created it is the human heart that sheds the brightest light and, alas, the blackest despair.”

“two principal problems. First problem: To produce wealth. Second problem: To distribute it.... England solves the first of these two problems. She creates wealth wonderfully; she distributes it badly.... [she has] a grandeur ill constituted, in which all the material elements are combined, and into which no moral element enters. Communism think they have solved the second problem. They are mistaken. They destroy production...”

“It would have been difficult to say what was the nature of this look, and whence proceeded the flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face,— one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude Frollo except his eyes.”

“To destroy abuses is not enough; Habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there."~old man G--- to Monseigneur Bienvenu Myriel”

“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?”