Emile Zola

If something's just, I'll let myself be hacked to bits for it.

How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ascend to heaven!

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

The day is not far off when one ordinary carrot may be pregnant with revolution.

The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one's toes on the gravestones.