"A saint addicted to excessive self-abnegation is a dangerous associate; he may infect you with poverty, and a stiffening of those joints which are needed for advancement-in a word, with more renunciation than you care for-and so you flee the contagion."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885 / Les Misérables / 1962)
"Superstition, bigotry and prejudice, ghosts though they are, cling tenaciously to life; they are shades armed with tooth and claw. They must be grappled with unceasingly, for it is a fateful part of human destiny that it is condemned to wage perpetual war against ghosts. A shade is not easily taken by the throat and destroyed."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885 / Les Misérables / 1962)
"Monasticism, as it existed in Spain and still exists in Tibet, is a wasting disease of civilization. It puts a stop to life. Quite simply, it depopulates. Claustration is castration. It has been the scourge of Europe. Add to this the violence so often inflicted on the conscience, the enforced vocations ... the closed mouths and minds, so much intelligence condemned to the imprisonment of vows for life, the burial of living souls. No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885 / Les Misérables / 1962)
"Religion is nothing but the shadow cast by the universe upon human intelligence."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885 / Philosophy, Beginning of a book)
"Christian Hell, fire. Pagan hell, fire. Muslim Hell, fire. Hindu hell, flames. According to religions, God was born a grill-room owner."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885 / Things Seen / 1887)
"Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885)
"Hell is an outrage on humanity. When you tell me that your deity made you in his image, I reply that he must have been very ugly."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885)
"Toleration is the best religion."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885)
"One can resist the invasion of an army but one cannot resist the invasion of ideas."
(Victor Hugo / 1802-1885)
