Marquis de Sade — "The greatest joy is to commit a crime and get away with it."
The greatest joy is to commit a crime and get away with it.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice."
"My manner of thinking, so you say, is an abomination. And yet, I have never been able to think otherwise."
"To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell."
"The only limit to our desires is our imagination."
"It is always by means of crimes that empires are founded."
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.