Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

The right is the just and the true.

The peculiarity of the right is that it is always beautiful and pure. The fact, even that which is most necessary in appearance, even that most accepted by its contemporaries, if it exist only as fact, and if it contain too little of the rith, or none at all, is destined infalliby to become, in the lapse of tim, deformed, unclean, perhaps even monstrous. . . .

This conflict of the right and the fact endures from the origin of society. To bring the duel to an end, to amalgamate the pure ideal with the human reality, to make the right peacefully interpenetrate the fact, and the fact the right, this is the work of the wise.

["Saint Denis," Book First, Chapter I]