Marquis de Sade Quotes

We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.

All things atrocious and shameless flock from all parts to Rome.

... a sensual and depraved people in our midst.

… the most depraved wretches on earth.

Vice is a peripatetic, always in progression.

Fattened in vice, so callous and so gross, he sins and sees not, senseless of his loss.

This is the very womb and bed of enormity.

The perception of the right of every man to do pretty much as he pleases…. [which will produce] a general profligacy and corruption such as this country has never known.

Never will there be grief enough over the corruption of morals so extensively increasing and promoted by irreligious and obscene writings, theatrical spectacles and meretricious houses established almost everywhere; by other depraved arts and monstrous portents of every error disseminated in all directions; by the abominable impurities of all vices and crimes growing constantly and the deadly virus of unbelief and indifferentism spread far and wide; by contempt for ecclesiastical authority

The priests, either from indulgence or carelessness, have allowed the wicked to give loose reins to their lusts

Gambling was carried on extensively, and the saloons were full... mostly every one seemed bent on debauchery and dissipation... There appears to be plenty of money here, and plenty of fools to squander it... I verily believe that there are men here who would murder a fellow-creature for five dollars...

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

Sordid and infamous sensuality, the most dreadful evil that issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts every heart, and eradicates every virtue. Fly! wherefore dost thou linger? Fly, cast not one look behind thee; nor let even thy thought return to the accursed evil for a moment.

Wilde is the greatest force for evil that has appeared in Europe during the last 350 years.

My mother thought Hollywood was a den of iniquity, and people came to terrible bad ends there.

The world is increasing in wickedness.

All things can corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.

The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst.

dangerous demagogue corrupt pervert, prostitute, debauch cursed.

... a moral skunk .... [who has] debauched America ...

Morally, as a class, cowboys are foulmouthed, blasphemous, drunken, lecherous, utterly corrupt. Usually harmless on the plains when sober, they are dreaded in towns, for then liquor has an ascendancy over them.

The American who drinks wine is in danger of becoming the victim of drunkenness, licentiousness, and gambling.