Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
MARQUIS DE SADEIs it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
MARQUIS DE SADENature has not got two voices, you know, one of them condemning all day what the other commands.
MARQUIS DE SADEThe primary and most beautiful of nature’s qualities is motion
MARQUIS DE SADEConversation, like certain portions of the anatomy, always runs more smoothly when lubricated.
MARQUIS DE SADEMy 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.
MARQUIS DE SADEWe are no guiltier in following the primative impulses that govern us than is the Nile for her floods or the sea for her waves.
MARQUIS DE SADEI 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.
MARQUIS DE SADEThe debility to which Nature condemned women incontestably proves that her design is for man, who then more than ever enjoys his strength, to exercise it in all the violent forms that suit him best, by means of tortures, if he be so inclined, or worse.
MARQUIS DE SADEThe completest submissiveness is your lot, and that is all.
MARQUIS DE SADESexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.
MARQUIS DE SADEAll 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 SADEOne must do violence to the object of one’s desire; when it surrenders, the pleasure is greater.
MARQUIS DE SADESo 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 SADEWolves which batten upon lambs, lambs consumed by wolves, the strong who immolate the weak, the weak victims of the strong.
MARQUIS DE SADEDread 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 SADEFor the simple reason that the first will always put the law into the service of the second.
MARQUIS DE SADE