“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.”

Why do you complain of your fate when you could so easily change it?

The degradation which characterizes the state into which you plunge him by punishing him pleases, amuses, and delights him.

You say that my way of thinking cannot be tolerated? What of it? The man who alters his way of thinking to suit othere is a fool.

What is more immoral than war?

So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .

The more defects a man may have, the older he is, the less lovable, the more resounding his success.

Conversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.

No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.

Sex without pain is like food without taste

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.

The primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion

One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.

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?

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?

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.

I write what I see, the endless procession to the guillotine. Were all lined up, waiting for the crunch of the blade…