Marquis de Sade — "I have always preferred the society of vice to that of virtue."
I have always preferred the society of vice to that of virtue.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"The greatest pleasure is to cause pain to others."
"My manner of thinking, so you say, is an abomination. And yet, I have never been able to think otherwise."
"My manner of thinking, so you say, cannot be approved. Do you suppose I care? A poor fool indeed is he who adopts a manner of thinking for others!"
"The greatest joy is to commit a crime and get away with it."
"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…"
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.