1740-1814, French Author
In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution… even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.
Marquis De Sade – [Sexuality]
It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.
Marquis De Sade – [Crime and Criminals]
Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.
Marquis De Sade – [Lust]
Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
Marquis De Sade – [Lust]
Lycurgus, Numa, Moses, Jesus Christ, Mohammed, all these great rogues, all these great thought-tyrants, knew how to associate the divinities they fabricated with their own boundless ambition.
Marquis De Sade – [Vision]
Man's natural character is to imitate; that of the sensitive man is to resemble as closely as possible the person whom he loves. It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.
Marquis De Sade – [Imitation]
Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?
Marquis De Sade – [Persecution]
Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime?
Marquis De Sade – [Murder]
Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
Marquis De Sade – [Nature]
Never lose sight of the fact that all human felicity lies in man's imagination, and that he cannot think to attain it unless he heeds all his caprices. The most fortunate of persons is he who has the most means to satisfy his vagaries.
Marquis De Sade – [Caprice]
Never may an act of possession be exercised upon a free being; the exclusive possession of a woman is no less unjust than the possession of slaves; all men are born free, all have equal rights: never should we lose sight of those principles; according to which never may there be granted to one sex the legitimate right to lay monopolizing hands upon the other, and never may one of the sexes, or classes, arbitrarily possess the other.
Marquis De Sade – [Submission]
No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful.
Marquis De Sade – [Infidelity]
One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants.
Marquis De Sade – [Cries and Crying]
Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!
Marquis De Sade – [Prejudice]
Religions are the cradles of despotism.
Marquis De Sade – [Religion]
She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.
Marquis De Sade – [Virginity]
So long as the laws remain such as they are today, employ some discretion: loud opinion forces us to do so; but in privacy and silence let us compensate ourselves for that cruel chastity we are obliged to display in public.
Marquis De Sade – [Tact and Tactfulness]
The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
Marquis De Sade – [Marriage]
The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
Marquis De Sade – [Imagination]
The majority of pop stars are complete idiots in every respect.
Marquis De Sade – [Fame]
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