“Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the idea of duty, are things that, when in error, can turn hideous, but – even though hideous – remain great; their majesty, peculiar to the human conscience, persists in horror. They are virtues with a single vice – error. The pitiless, sincere joy of a fanatic in an act of atrocity preserves some mournful radiance that inspires veneration. Without suspecting it, Javert, in his dreadful happiness, was pitiful, like every ignorant man in triumph. Nothing could be more poignant and terrible than this face, which revealed what might be called all the evil of good. (pg. 291)”

“Without knowing it, Javert in his awful happiness was deserving of pity, like every ignorant man who triumphs. Nothing could have been more poignant or more heartrending than that countenance on which was inscribed all the evil in what is good.”

“The worst vice of a fanatic is his sincerity.”

“These are attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty. However sincere the current evangelists of unbelief may be, they are doing nothing more than producing rationales--ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors--for convictions that are rooted not in reason but in a greater cultural will, of which their arguments are only reflexes.”

“The evil in the world comes almost always from ignorance, and goodwill can cause as much damage as ill-will if it is not enlightened. People are more often good than bad, though in fact that is not the question. But they are more or less ignorant and this is what one calls vice or virtue, the most appalling vice being the ignorance that thinks it knows everything and which consequently authorizes itself to kill. The murderer's soul is blind, and there is no true goodness or fine love without the greatest possible degree of clear-sightedness.”

“In the moment when the eyes of the two men met, Javert, without having moved or made the least gesture, became hideous. No human emotion can wear an aspect so terrible as that of jubilation. He had the face of a fiend who has found the victim he thought he had lost.”