Marquis de Sade Quotes

I do not see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.

Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.

Violence is literally the glue of the cycle of life, and yet I think that we're the only species that does it maliciously.

Nature has, herself, I fear, imprinted in man a kind of instinct to inhumanity.

Do you think... that men have always massacred each other, as they do today? Have they always been liars, cheats, traitors, brigands, weak, flighty, cowardly, envious, gluttonous, drunken, grasping, and vicious, bloody, backbiting, debauched, fanatical, hypocritical, and silly?

We do want to drive out the beast in man, but we do not want on that account to emasculate him.

Men are as we have always known them, neither better nor worse from the hearts of rogues there springs a latent honesty, from the depths of honest men there emerges a brutish appetite - a thirst for extermination, a desire for blood.

We, as human beings, have the capacity for extreme cruelty.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious; he learned the habit from Nature.

If we know anything about man, it's that he's not pacific. The temptation to butcher anyone considered undesirable seems to be a common temptation, not always resisted.

The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous.

Men are beasts and even beasts don't behave as they do.

We'll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

I have no problem with violence, I have no problem playing horrible people.

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.

We humans are a fairly barbarous bunch.

Is the capacity for cruelty inherent in all of us?

People are ruthless, man.

Atrocities are human nature - they don't have political beliefs, color, creed or anything like that. They just happen, it's human.

We're animals. We're violent. We're criminal.

Are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

It is a sin peculiar to man to hate his victim.

Human beings can do some God-awful things to other human beings

The scariest monsters are human beings and what we will do to each other.