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?
MARQUIS DE SADEIf Nature denies eternity to beings, it follows that their destruction is one of her laws.
More Marquis de Sade Quotes
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At all times, in every century, every age, there has been such a connection between despotism and religion that it is infinitely apparent and demonstrated a thousand times over, that in destroying one, the other must be undermined.
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We monsters are necessary to nature also.
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To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.
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Let not your zeal to share your principles entice you beyond your borders.
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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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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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In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.
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Don’t have children: they deform women’s bodies and turn into an enemy 20 years later.
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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.
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Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.
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Conscience is not the voice of Nature but only the voice of prejudice.
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According to these irrefutable principles, death is hence no more than a change of form, an imperceptible passage from one existence into another.
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Are 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.
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The infant breaks his toy, bites his nurse’s breast, strangles his canary long before he is able to reason; cruelty is stamped in animals, in whom, as I think I have said, Nature’s laws are more emphatically to be read than in ourselves; cruelty exists amongst savages.
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The mirror sees the man as beautiful, the mirror loves the man; another mirror sees the man as frightful and hates him; and it is always the same being who produces the impressions.
MARQUIS DE SADE






