Marquis de Sade — "The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind."
The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"The only truth is that there is no truth."
"What is crime? What is virtue? All depends on the point of view."
"No lover, if he be of good faith, and sincere, will deny he would prefer to see his mistress dead than unfaithful."
"I have always preferred the society of vice to that of virtue."
"The imagination is the most marvelous of all the senses."
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.