Marquis de Sade — "Nature has made us perverse, and we are only following her dictates."
Nature has made us perverse, and we are only following her dictates.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"The only real crime is to be boring."
"Nature has granted me a temperament that is too ardent, a soul too impetuous, a character too strong, for me to be able to submit to the yoke of any laws."
"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, w…"
"I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I ca…"
"The greatest pleasure is to defy God."
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.