Marquis de Sade — "The greatest pleasure of all is to give pain."
The greatest pleasure of all is to give pain.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"After demonstrating that theism is unsuitable for a republican government, I find it crucial to prove that French morals are likewise inappropriate."
"What is more immoral than war?"
"I laugh at everything, because I am afraid of nothing."
"The more atrocious a crime is, the more it flatters one's vanity."
"The only true pleasure is that which is forbidden."
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.
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