Marquis de Sade — "Laws are made to be broken."
Laws are made to be broken.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"There is no crime that does not contain a certain amount of pleasure."
"To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell."
"The universe is a chaos of matter and motion, without any intelligent principle."
"The most beautiful things are those that are conceived in hell and born in heaven."
"What is more immoral than war?"
About Marquis de Sade (1740-1814)
French aristocrat-libertine whose name became 'sadism' and whose novels test the limits of Enlightenment liberalism's 'do as you will' axiom. Closely associated with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les Liaisons dangereuses author). For an intellectual contrast, see Immanuel Kant, German Enlightenment philosopher of the categorical imperative — Sade and Kant published in the same decades; Kant's 'treat others as ends, never means' is the systematic ethical opposite of Sade's libertine instrumentalism — the two roads philosophy took out of Enlightenment freedom.
The standard scholarly entry points to Marquis de Sade's work: Maurice Blanchot (French literary critic) — Lautréamont and Sade (1949); Jacques Lacan (École freudienne de Paris) — Kant with Sade (1963 essay); Camille Paglia (University of the Arts Philadelphia) — Sexual Personae (1990) — extensive Sade chapters. These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Marquis de Sade.