Marquis de Sade — "It is always by means of crimes that empires are founded."
It is always by means of crimes that empires are founded.
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More from Marquis de Sade
"Nature has granted me a temperament that is too ardent, a soul too impetuous, a character too strong, for me to be able to submit to the yoke of any laws."
"Virtue is nothing more than a chimera."
"Nothing is as encouraging as a first crime that goes unpunished."
"Virtue is a chimera, a dream, a fantasy."
"Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?"
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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