Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.
MARQUIS DE SADEAre not laws dangerous which inhibit the passions? Compare the centuries of anarchy with those of the strongest legalism in any country you like and you will see that it is only when the laws are silent that the greatest actions appear.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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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 -
Wolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong.
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Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence.
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We devastate the world, we repopulate it with new objects which, in turn, we immolate. The means to every crime is ours, and we employ them all, we multiply the horror a hundredfold.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
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!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Chimerical and empty being, your name alone has caused more blood to flow on the face of the earth than any political war ever will.
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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.
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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 -
Sex without pain is like food without taste
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Behold, my love, behold all that I simultaneously do: scandal, seduction, bad example, incest, adultery, sodomy!
MARQUIS DE SADE -
What is more immoral than war?
MARQUIS DE SADE -
It requires only two things to win credit for a miracle: a mountebank and a number of silly women.
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My manner of thinking stems straight from my considered reflections; it holds with my existence, with the way I am made. It is not in my power to alter it; and were it, I’d not do so.
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What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do.
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Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.
MARQUIS DE SADE -
Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.
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I want to be the victim of his errors.
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Certain 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.
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Even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.
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Virtue can procure only an imaginary happiness; true felicity lies only in the senses, and virtue gratifies none of them.
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Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.
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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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Nature has endowed each of us with a capacity for kindly feelings: let us not squander them on others.
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One is never so dangerous when one has no shame, than when one has grown too old to blush.
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It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.
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My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care?
MARQUIS DE SADE