“One resists the invasion of armies; one does not resist the invasion of ideas.”
“No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”
Variant: No force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come
“There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”
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.
Paraphrasing Victor Hugo when speaking about the Civil Rights Act of 1964 http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Civil_Rights_Filibuster_Ended.htm (10 June 1964)
1960s
Source: Soon I Will Be Invincible (2007), Ch. 5: Free at Last
“This distinction between invasion and resistance, between government and defence, is vital.”
The Relation of the State to the Invididual (1890)
Context: This distinction between invasion and resistance, between government and defence, is vital. Without it there can be no valid philosophy of politics. Upon this distinction and the other considerations just outlined, the Anarchists frame the desired definitions. This, then, is the Anarchistic definition of government: the subjection of the non-invasive individual to an external will. And this is the Anarchistic definition of the State: the embodiment of the principle of invasion in an individual, or a band of individuals, assuming to act as representatives or masters of the entire people within a given area.
Source: Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies - (Second Edition), Chapter 1, How Does an Idea's Time Come?, p. 1
Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 355
Brooks D. Simpson. "The Soldiers' Flag?" https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2015/07/05/the-soldiers-flag/ (5 July 2015), Crossroads, WordPress
2010s
