Marquis de Sade

There are,' said Curval, 'but two or three crimes to perform in this world, and they, once done, there's no more to be said; all the rest is inferior, you cease any longer to feel.

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.

The reasoning man who scorns the prejudices of simpletons necessarily becomes the enemy of simpletons; he must expect as much, and laugh at the inevitable.

Ah, Eugenie, have done with virtues!

It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates. Beauty is a simple thing ugliness is the exceptional thing. And fiery imaginations, no doubt, always prefer the extraordinary thing to the simple thing.

It is certain that stealing nourishes courage, strength, skill, tact, in a word, all the virtues useful to a republican system and consequently to our own. Lay partiality aside, and answer me: is theft, whose effect is to distribute wealth more evenly, to be branded as a wrong in our day, under our government which aims at equality? Plainly, the answer is no.

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!

How many times, by God's bloody prick, have I longed to be able to detonate planets, to destroy the sun itself, to pluck it from the universe and crash it into the earth, annihilating all Creation and replacing it with a lightless void of violence. Ah, that would be a crime! A cosmic crime, dwarfing the petty misdemeanours we are committing here, limited as we are to snuffing out a few meaningless souls.

It is utterly misguided to say that the mouth of a woman or young boy must be absolutely clean in order to give pleasure; putting all manias to one side, I shall grant you if you wish that a man who craves a stinking mouth does so only out of depravity, but you must in return grant me that a mouth without the slightest fragrance gives no pleasure at all when kissed – there must always be a certain spice, a certain piquancy to all such pleasures and this picquancy is found only in a little filth.

My manner of thinking, I own, is not for all the world. Few will like it. It is too bold. It will not submit to the curb of any established system, nor will it be bound by any known code. It is free, and it will be free.

The most delicious of all pleasures is to be in the wrong.

It is not by the force of the lash that one brings down a human being to the level of the beast.

What is crime? What is virtue? All depends on the point of view.

My friend, you must understand that I am a man of letters, and that is why I write.

The only way to arrive at the truth is through the most profound errors.

I have spent my life in prisons, and I have found the solitude to be a great source of inspiration.

Nature has made us perverse, and we are only following her dictates.

I write for myself, and for those who resemble me.

My only pleasure is to do what is forbidden.

I am a philosopher, and I have the right to think what I please.