Quotes About Society

Where are your free and compulsory schools? Does every one know how to read in the land of Dante and of Michael Angelo? Have you made public schools of your barracks? Have you not, like ourselves, an opulent war-budget and a paltry budget of education?

What is this history of Fantine? It is society purchasing a slave. From whom? From misery. From hunger, cold, isolation, destitution. A dolorous bargain. A soul for a morsel of bread. Misery offers; society accepts.

Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable

When they saw him making money, they said, He is a man of business. When they saw him scattering his money about, they said, He is an ambitious man. When he was seen to decline honors, they said, He is an adventurer. When they saw him repulse society, they said, He is a brute.

It is sad to tell, but after having tried society, which had caused his misfortune, he tried Providence which created society, and condemned it also.

Equality does not mean that all plants must grow to the same height - a society of tall grass and dwarf trees, a jostle of conflicting jealousies. It means, in civic terms, an equal outlet for all talents; in political terms, that all votes will carry the same weight; and in religious terms that all beliefs will enjoy equal rights.

three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved;

En France, que de gens à longues oreilles : ânes en littérature, lièvres en politique !

Il visitait les pauvres tant qu'il avait de l'argent; quand il n'en avait plus, il visitait les riches.

We live in a squalid society. Success: this is the message seeping, drop by drop, down from the overriding corruption.

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. During this journey in 1825

He asked himself whether human society could have the right also to subject its members,on the one hand,to its crazy lack of foresight and,on the other,to its pitiless foresight,and to hold a poor man forever between a lack and an excess-lack of work and excess of punishment

Ensinem o mais possível aos que nada sabem; a sociedade é culpada de não instruir gratuitamente e responderá pela escuridão que provoca. Uma alma na sombra da ignorância comete um pecado? A culpa não é de quem o faz, mas de quem provocou a sombra.

What an ominous minute is that in which society draws back and consummates the irreparable abandonment of a sentient being!

Oh, implacable march of human societies! Oh, losses of men and of souls on the way! Ocean into which falls all that the law lets slip! Disastrous absence of help! Oh, moral death! The sea is the inexorable social night into which the penal laws fling their condemned. The sea is the immensity of wretchedness. The soul, going down stream in this gulf, may become a corpse. Who shall resuscitate it?

destiny; so long as the three great problems of the century—the degradation of man through pauperism, the corruption of woman through hunger, the crippling of children through lack of light—are unsolved; so long as social asphyxia is possible in any part of the world;—in other words, and with a still wider significance, so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use. HAUTEVILLE HOUSE, 1862.

the galleys make the convict what he is; reflect upon that, if you please.

Revolution is the accession of the peoples, and, at the bottom, the People is Man.

A los ignorantes enseñadles lo más que podáis; la sociedad es culpable por no dar instrucción gratis; es responsable de la oscuridad que con esto produce. Si un alma sumida en las tinieblas comete un pecado, el culpable no es en realidad el que peca, sino el que no disipa las tinieblas

Men and deeds were brought to judgment there. They jeered at the age, which released them from the necessity of understanding it.

It is the story of society's purchase of a slave. A slave purchased from poverty, hunger, cold, loneliness, defenselessness, destitution. A squalid bargain: human soul for a hunk of bread. Poverty offers and society accepts.

Society absolutely must look into these things since they are its own work.

Teach those who are ignorant as many things as possible; society is culpable, in that it does not afford instruction gratis; it is responsible for the night which it produces. This soul is full of shadow; sin is therein committed. The guilty one is not the person who has committed the sin, but the person who has created the shadow." It

Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, men recognize that the human race has been harshly treated but that it has moved forward.