Marquis de Sade — "Fear and ignorance, you will continue, are two mainstays of any and all religion…"
Fear and ignorance, you will continue, are two mainstays of any and all religions.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"There is no good or evil in nature, only force and necessity. It is men, in their arrogance, who dare to dictate laws to the universe, calling natural impulses 'virtue' or 'vice.' But nature knows no …"
"It is not by the means of a religion that we can conquer nature, but by the means of nature that we can conquer religion."
"Sex should be a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. Without that symmetry, sex becomes a routine rather than an indulgence."
"My friend, you must understand that I am a man of letters, and that is why I write."
"There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author."
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.