“Ideas are more powerful than guns.”

Often attributed to Hugo as a paraphrase of a similar idea in his Histore d'un Crime (1877): "One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas", the wording of this famous statement actually more closely resembles a passage from the relatively obscure Les Francs-Tireurs (1861) by Gustave Aimard, p. 68 https://books.google.com/books/about/Les_francs_tireurs.html?id=mKI4AQAAIAAJ:
Il y a quelque chose de plus puissant que la force brutale des baïonnettes: c'est l'idée dont le temps est venu et l'heure est sonnée.
There is something more powerful than the brute force of bayonets: it is the idea whose time has come and hour struck.
Translated into English as The Freebooters : A Story of the Texan War (1861) https://archive.org/details/freebootersstory00aima, p. 57, Ward & Lock edition
Misattributed
Variant: More powerful than the mighty armies is an idea whose time has come.

2015, Leaders' Summit on Countering ISIL and Violent Extremism speech (September 2015)

Source: Brother Odd (2006), Chapter 38

Ce n'est pas la première fois que je remarque combien, en France particulièrement, les mots ont plus d’empire que les idées.
Indiana, pt. 1, ch. 2 (1832); Sylvia Raphael (trans.) Indiana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) p. 23

Variant: Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks."

-Don Vito Corleone
Source: The Godfather

Ruger to Tom Brokaw of NBC News in 1992. ([Fully Loaded: Inside the Shadowy World of America’s 10 Biggest Gunmakers, Josh, Harkinson, June 14, 2016, May 31, 2018, Mother Jones, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/fully-loaded-ten-biggest-gun-manufacturers-america/]; [Magazine limits were first proposed by Connecticut gun maker, Connecticut Magazine, New Haven Register, April 1, 2013, June 6, 2018, https://www.nhregister.com/connecticut/article/Magazine-limits-were-first-proposed-by-11435654.php]).

Context: Circumstances have been such, that I have lived almost entirely secluded for some time. Those who are much in earnest and with single minds devoted to any great object in life, must find this occasionally inevitable.... You will wonder at having heard nothing from me; but you have experience and candour enough to perceive and know that God has not given to us (in this state of existence) more than very limited powers of expression of one's ideas and feelings... I shall be very desirous of again seeing you. You know what that means from me, and that it is no form, but the simple expression and result of the respect and attraction I feel for a mind that ventures to read direct in God's own book, and not merely thro' man's translation of that same vast and mighty work.

In a letter to Andrew Crosse, as quoted in Eugen Kölbing's Englische Studien, Volume 19 https://archive.org/stream/englischestudien19leipuoft#page/157/mode/1up (1894), Leipzig; O.R. Reisland, "Byron's Daughter", p. 157.

"U of O Speech Cancelled" in The Ottawa Citizen (24 March 2010) http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/speech+cancelled/2718883/story.html.
2010