Laudator Temporis Acti

Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, Book III, Chapter 1 (tr. Alban Krailsheimer):

Three sorts of damage can be distinguished on the ruins, and they all affect it at different depths: first is time, which has chipped it away imperceptibly here and there and left rust all over its surface; then political and religious revolutions which, blind and angry by their very nature, have hurled themselves upon it in tumult, rent its rich array of sculptures and carvings, smashed its rose-windows, broken its necklaces of arabesques and figurines, torn down its statues, sometimes for wearing a mitre, sometimes a crown; finally fashions, increasingly silly and absurd, which after the splendidly anarchic deviations of the Renaissance, have succeeded one another in the inevitable decline of architecture. Fashions have done more harm than revolutions. They have cut into the living flesh, attacked the bone-structure of the art underneath, they have hewn, hacked, dislocated, killed the building, in its form as in its symbolism, in its logic as in its beauty.