It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.
MARQUIS DE SADECertain souls seem hard because they are capable of strong feelings, and they sometimes go to rather extreme lengths; their apparent unconcern and cruelty are but ways, known only to themselves, of feeling more strongly than others.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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Dread not infanticide; the crime is imaginary: we are always mistress of what we carry in our womb, and we do no more harm in destroying this kind of matter than in evacuating another, by medicines, when we feel the need.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Lust’s passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes.
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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?
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Happiness is an abstraction, it is a product of the imagination, it is a way of being moved, which depends entirely on our way of seeing and feeling.
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Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!
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No kind of sensation is keener and more active than that of pain its impressions are unmistakable.
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Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.
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There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
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One must feel sorry for those who have strange tastes, but never insult them. Their wrong is Nature’s too; they are no more responsible for having come into the world with tendencies unlike ours than are we for being born bandy-legged or well-proportioned.
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It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
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So much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . .
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I assumed that everything must yield to me, that the entire universe had to flatter my whims, and that I had the right to satisfy them at will.
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Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist.
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For the simple reason that the first will always put the law into the service of the second.
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Get it into your head once and for all, my simple and very fainthearted fellow, that what fools call humanness is nothing but a weakness born of fear and egoism; that this chimerical virtue, enslaving only weak men, is unknown to those whose character is formed by stoicism, courage, and philosophy.
MARQUIS DE SADE






