“If we punished only the crimes we could prove, we would not enjoy the pleasure of dragging our fellow human beings to the scaffold so much as four times a century, and that is the only thing that makes us… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
“Not many people can imagine a president of the Parlement of Aix—it is a species of beast of which people have often spoken without knowing it well: strict and unbending by profession, and pernickety, credulous, stubborn, vain, cowardly, garrulous and… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
What you call disorder is nothing else than one of the laws of the order you comprehend not and which you have erroneously named… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
And if I were a naughty little boy, the idea is to spank me into good behavior? — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship. — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
“To enlighten mankind and improve its morals is the only lesson which we offer in this story. In reading it, may the world discover… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
What we are doing here is only the image of what we would like to do. — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
What does one want when one is engaged in the sexual act? That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime--for a second crime is every day… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
Between understanding and faith immediate connections must subsist. — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind. — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image
Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism,… — Marquis de Sade Copy Share Image