Victor Hugo Quotes
It is most pleasant to commit a just action which is disagreeable to someone whom one does not like.
The British Government had offered a £20,000 prize for the first person who developed a practical method of determining longitude at sea. Most of the university, military and religious scientists of the day worked on astronomical instrument approaches but Harrison, a relatively unknown clockmaker with no social or scientific credentials, came up with an incredibly accurate clock that would function at sea and immediately calculate the longitude. The scientific establishment refused to certify Harrison for the price even after the British Navy had determined that his method worked. At the urging of the King, Parliament voted him the money.
They had seen many other abolitionists attacked and butchered by the pro-slavery forces. The civil war of Kansas was over whether Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state of a free state. If a free state, the free states would be able to block further slavery. If Kansas were to become a slave state, the slave states would have a sufficient majority to make all future expansion hospitable to slavery. The slavery forces started sending man and families into Kansas so that they could vote; the abolitionists did the same. Both sides armed and a war began with each faction trying to kill or drive the other faction out of Kansas before the vote. See {617388} and {612516}.
Victor-Marie Hugo was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.
