MARQUIS DE SADE

(Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade | Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade)


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Marquis de Sade

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all. 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, so much nearer to Nature than civilized men are; absurd then to maintain cruelty is a consequence of depravity. . . . Cruelty is simply the energy in a man civilization has not yet altogether corrupted: therefore it is a virtue, not a vice.
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Marquis de Sade

There is a kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship.
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Marquis de Sade

Capital punishment is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime—for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold
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The most common example that capital punishment does not work as a deterrent is that while thieves were being hung for their crime, other thieves would circulate among the watching crowd at the scaffold and pickpocket the observers.

Marquis de Sade

I want to be the victim of his errors.
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Marquis de Sade

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
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Marquis de Sade

Are wars anything but the means whereby a nation is nourished, whereby it is strengthened, whereby it is buttressed?
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Marquis de Sade

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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Marquis de Sade

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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Marquis de Sade

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.
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Marquis de Sade

One weeps not save when one is afraid, and that is why kings are tyrants.
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Marquis de Sade
© Charles-Amédée-Philippe van Loo (1719–17
Marquis de Sade
  • Born: June 2, 1740
  • Died: December 2, 1814
  • Nationality: French
  • Profession: Novelist
Biography

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a French nobleman, revolutionary politician, philosopher and writer famous for his libertine sexuality. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts. He was a proponent of absolute freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion, or law. The words sadism and sadist are derived in reference to the works of fiction he wrote which portrayed numerous acts of sexual cruelty.

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Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Andre Gide, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Anatole France, George Sand, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette