“What is more immoral than war?”

Were he supreme, were he mighty, were he just, were he good, this God you tell me about, would it be through enigmas and buffooneries he would wish to teach me to serve and know him?

Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts.

Happiness lies only in that which excites, and the only thing that excites is crime.

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change.

One must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.

According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.

All universal moral principles are idle fancies.

There are thorns everywhere, but along the path of vice, roses bloom above them.

Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.

Return to the nothingness from which the mad hope and ridiculous fright of men dared call you forth to their misfortune. You only appeared as a torment for the human race.

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.

We monsters are necessary to nature also.

Oh, Satan! one and unique God of my soul, inspire thou in me something yet more, present further perversions to my smoking heart, and then shalt thou see how I shall plunge myself into them all!

Let us give ourselves indiscriminately to everything our passions suggest, and we will always be happy…

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep.

When I’m doing something funny, I wish I was doing something more serious.

His name was George F. Babbitt, and . . . he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay.

I am convinced that Nigeria would have been a more highly developed country without the oil. I wished we’d never smelled the fumes of petroleum.

It is more important to know the person who has the condition than it is to know the condition the person has.

There are more words in the IRS code than there are in the Bible. And not a one of them is as good.

There’s a lot of falses – out there and if I take up for myself, it’s a bad thing. Sometimes you just got to live with it, but for the most part, I’m like look, I don’t want no problems with nobody.

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.

I dream of a love that is more than two people craving to possess one another.