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“When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression. Plus, of course, friendship—though I like to think that my reaction would have been the same if I hadn't known Salman at all. To re-state the premise of the argument again: the theocratic head of a foreign despotism offers money in his own name in order to suborn the murder of a civilian citizen of another country, for the offense of writing a work of fiction. No more root-and-branch challenge to the values of the Enlightenment (on the bicentennial of the fall of the Bastille) or to the First Amendment to the Constitution, could be imagined. President George H.W. Bush, when asked to comment, could only say grudgingly that, as far as he could see, no American interests were involvedâ€�”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“But if you close your eyes,does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?”
― Bastille Pompeii

“C'etait un jour de fete.
Mais l'haine se repete.
Laissez pas la peur dominer le coeur,
Si on veut que l'amour soit vainqueur”
― Ana Claudia Antunes, L'Amante de Victor Hugo

“There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.”
― Lytton Strachey, Landmarks in French Literature